Compassionate People

America: the land of compassion. Doubtless, few will disagree, but mostly because each Left and Right stakes a claim to having it while the other doesn’t. I am one of those.

Though it is quite the mystery for lefties to understand exactly how we conservatives can claim be compassionate, the facts and logic state – or should – indisputably that such is true. The Right, year in and out, donates such a larger portion of their incomes to charitable organizations as compared to folks on the Left by so large a margin that this fact alone should be enough to end all debate. But the facts only begin there. The ideological differences between Left and Right are what really create the delineation regarding the degree of compassion.

Liberals “compassion” derives from the notion of providing entitlements to victims, victims created by their suffocation of the free market. The Left doesn’t want folks creating and providing for themselves, they want people in bread lines, pleading for alms doled out from the Left’s oh-so-generous coffers. All the while, those very alms which are handed out to those in need are taken from those who’ve worked for and earned them. Their compassion lies in taking away from one to give to another. Though they’ll never bring themselves to see this hypocrisy, they must first deprive one in order to show compassion to another.

Conservatives’ notion of compassion couldn’t be more divergent. The works of Ayn Rand provide, by far, the best descriptions and explanations of how free enterprise truly provides, compassionately, to all who participate in that market. Conservatives, like the Founders created, would return our national and regional economic picture to a true, common market. In a common market, a producer creates a product. A consumer needs that product and so enters into a trade with the producer. Each benefit from the exchange as one gains a measure of wealth and the other gains the product so needed or desired. Again, both parties come away as winners. The Left detests this sort of free trade because they and their public sector are not needed at any stage of the transaction. Neither the producer nor the consumer has need of their alms.

Immigration, though, you say, is a whole ‘nother beast.

No, it isn’t.

Despite the Left’s and their lackeys’ (the MSM) claims, allowing millions upon millions of illegal immigrants to enter into and subsequently drain the coffers of the United States is anything but compassionate. Nor are conservatives anti-immigration. Doubtless, the MSM will never address these truths. The fact is that legal immigration is a benefit to the United States. Such immigrants enter into America’s free market and participate as producers, consumers, or both. Such participation creates more wealth – instead of taking from another’s piece of the pie, they simply make their own. This is how a free market works!

An illegal immigrant enters and immediately begins draining the public coffers. This immigrant does not participate in the market as a consumer. He creates a piece of the pie and, instead of entering into the next step of the business cycle, he wires the money to his home country where the wealth is then used to advantage in that country’s market. This immigrant does not pay income taxes to the local, state, or federal governments which pay for the services and welfare entitlements he enjoys. This immigrant is a leech, but there is more to allowing such compassion.

This immigrant, besides defying federal law, gathers with a dozen others like him and, in exchange for a fraction of his income, rents a tiny apartment where he berths in the corner of the room. In the early mornings, he wakes and gathers with his roommates and myriad others like him in certain parking lots around the area. If he’s lucky, he has made enough of an impression on a contractor that he has a relatively steady reliance on work; else, he has to try his luck “catching out” like the others. If he is late to the parking lot or isn’t fast enough in answering the call for “I need three who can hang dry-wall,” he is left with nothing to do other than return to his apartment with hopes of better luck the next day.

If he is lucky enough to “catch out” or work for a regular crew, his day is long, physically taxing, and compensated only as high as he can bargain. Though compensation is often less than minimum wage rates, a generous boss will go for $10 an hour for menial labor and maybe $15 for any skilled work. The boss, of course, won’t be forking out any insurance co-pays, employment taxes, Social Security, or matching retirement plan contributions; but, he may pick up lunch.

When he goes home to the tiny apartment shared with the dozen others, which is invariably located in the poorest parts of town, he then has to worry over the criminal element. While there is relative safety in numbers, kidnappings, literal enslavement, extortion, and random street crime is a constant threat. He cannot rely too heavily on law enforcement less he risk deportation; but, there is safety in numbers and they are many in number.

Where is the compassion in allowing the continuance of such immigration? Not only is such immigration illegal and damaging to our country, it is inhumane. Make no mistake, the Left only wants to expand this sort of immigration. Their motive is clear: by creating and continuing the existence of such a demographic they have a reliably base of “victims” dependant on the Left’s compassionate welfare programs at every election. Is it any wonder that wholesale amnesty is the Left’s aim for the up-coming Immigration Reform?

Conservatives believe in tough love, true. Really, though, what is so tough about enforcing federal immigration laws that would prevent such inhumanity and widespread damage? The Left would argue that the poor conditions they experience here as illegal immigrants is superior to the conditions from which they left behind. I say, sorry, but I am not willing to stoop so low. The slave states, then, could very well have argued that our version of slavery was acceptable because it wasn’t as bad for the slaves as it had been back in Africa. How about this: why not enforce our federal laws so to prevent this illegal activity that reduces our level of civility to ugly levels and, in turn, marshal our many activist groups to publicly hold these would-be immigrants’ nations accountable for the conditions they flee? Mexico has immigration laws so strict as to make the federal laws that, we, the United States have pale . . . and Mexico enforces its immigration laws energetically. Yet another hypocrisy the MSM has certainly avoided.

Now Arizona has bravely decided to stand for its own stability and, perhaps, salvation by enacting a law that allows the law enforcement agents of that state to enforce the very same federal laws not being enforced by our federal government. And Arizonans are now, in the esteem of idiots, the MSM, and the left, are heralded as bigots.

If you voted for Mr. Obama and are now not sorry for having done so, I am confident that your outlook will not change after having read this opinion. Honestly, I doubt you will have bothered reading this far. If you have, though, I challenge you try to define your own notions of compassion and see if the socialist model is in synch. I, for one, will never be able to see how inflicting poverty, dependence, and the loss of liberties can be anyway defined as the results of one’s compassion.