www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Orthodox Church in support of Putin: yes to crack down on immigra

What makes you think you see the world clearly, Bruce? Your vision is rather crabbed and distorted, in my opinion, based more on your own prejudices than facts.

As regards the Good Samaritan, Samaria was part of the Roman province of Judea--no travel documents required. As regards Abram, yes he did, as various Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform tablets make clear. Likewise Jacob and his sons when they went into Egypt. The Davidic Kingdom and its successors likewise required the registration of aliens (how else to enumerate them?).

This is an area the Church leaves to the prudential judgment of the secular authorities. It has always been so. The Roman Empire established limes or demarcated borders and controlled the influx of immigrants from the barbarian lands. When it could no longer do this, the barbarians flooded in, and the Empire collapsed (in the West) or was hard-pressed to survive (in the East). Compassion need not be a suicide pact. Nations have a right to secure and control their borders. It's not a matter of hate, it's a matter of security and common sense.

Mexico's immigration laws are draconian and hardly a model for the U.S. As far as I know, they are uttlerly devoid of flexibility, adaptation to particular circumstances and completely uninfluenced by the Gospel. (perhaps, though, a mordida (bribe) comes in handy for people who run afoul of them) Thus it's utterly hypocritical of the Mexican government to chide the U.S. for enforcing it's own comparatively compassionate immigration policies.

Precisely my point. Just who are they to lecture us?

Can you imagine going to Germany, sneaking in without telling anybody, driving around without getting licensed, working with no or false documents, and then getting caught, and acting like God gave you the right to waltz into Germany whenever you felt like it?

What does God have to do with immigration laws, other than the admonition that we are to obey laws?

It boggles the mind.

Actually, that's Germany's problem right now--due to the EU's open border policy and Germany's Gastarbeiter program, Germany is swarming with undocumented Muslim workers, most of whom are unemployed, living on the dole, and slowly subverting German society. Germany started the problem itself through its Guest Worker (Gastarbeiter) program that allowed tens of thousands of Turks to come into the country to take menial jobs for which there were insufficient Germans available. But then the EU established an open border policy; i.e., a person living in one EU country can freely move throughout all EU countries without a passport. This meant that Algerians sneaking into France, Libyans, Tunisians and Albanians sneaking into Italy, Saudis and Pakistanis sneaking into Britain, and Indonesians sneaking into the Netherlands, could all then move to Germany and set up house.

Moreover, these illegal immigrants have proven to be unassimilable. Self-ghetoizing, they run their communities as states within the state, and aggressively attempt to assert their right to be ruled by Sharia within Germany. Crimes associated with these immigrant groups are on the rise, and involve not only crimes against property, but crimes against persons, including a high incidence of rape, as well as a spate of "honor killings", mainly involving female victims.

The situation has become so bad that German nativist parties are growing in strength, and Chancellor Angela Merkel has stated publicly that the policy of multiculturalism has failed. A consensus is rising in Germany that immigration has to be controlled, and that those immigrants allowed to live in Germany will have to become German in outlook.

The situation in Germany is mirrored throughout Europe, due mainly to a very loud, pushy, and obnoxious Islamic minority that runs with scissors (pausing periodically to thrust them into the chests of cartoonists and film makers it dislikes) and does not play well with others.

I think I can be forgiven for anticipating that people who come here do so out of a sense of raising the World above the standard to which it falls when left to its secular devices.

One does not have to be a Christian....even a Byzantine Catholic...... to rationalize delegating one's own responsibilities to a secular government. Nobody said being a Christian was a singularly easy Road to walk and there are more than a few who, when asked to put their Faith into action on behalf of their fellow man, find all sorts of excuses.

I am more than a little familiar with using Intellectualism to obfuscate what is primarily a Humanitarian issue. However, playing word-games will not, and does not, relieve you of the obligation to address the suffering of the people around you. If you choose to do this, it is not my place to judge you. I can't say if you are wrong, but I think you may be "wrong-headed".

Best Wishes,

Bruce

"Suffering"?

Bruce has a rather idiosyncratic approach to capitalization, no?

The problem Stuart is that some of us can smell jingoistic nonsense trying to pass itself off as Christianity. I find myself, especially as a convert to the Catholic faith who used to hold to this very kind of selective history, appalled that Catholics, of all people, should fall into this trap. America is not the shining city upon the hill. That appellation was given to the Church.

I am also hard pressed to understand those who refuse to take a long and hard look at the way that their own fellow Catholics were treated by the mainly Protestant Americans of this country for a long time. Must I drag out the Thomas Nast cartoons of a century gone by to remind you? Of all people, we should be following the Lord first and the Americanism (which was condemned by Pope Leo XIII) not at all.

I will be happy to give you a long list of the nasty ways in which our government over the ages has happily persecuted minorities, bullied their way around the world, and generally acts as if the "American Dream" is something that every country eventually shall have -- LIKE IT OR NOT!!! Iraq and the lies that got us in to that war, is the latest example. Pope John Paul II condemned the war as unjust and was followed by the USCCB.

We have interfered in so many Latin American countries, covertly assassinating their duly elected leaders because we didn't like the political system they chose, that is no wonder that those who have suffered under our meddling are now seeking some relief in the form of sneaking over our borders for a new life. Maybe if we had minded our own business instead of meddling everywhere -- or even better yet, had actually HELPED other countries to develop thriving national economies instead of destabilizing them so that our corporations could move in on them and claim the national resources in the midst of the chaos, this would have never happened.

Christian country my Aunt Minnie!!!

I can't quite see what America's countless past and present sins have to do with immigration policy. Are you really saying that America must, to be just, open her borders completely? Exercise no control over who is allowed in?

It isn't that I blame people particularly for sneaking in, but neither do I blame anybody for kicking them back out.

Two wrongs do not make a right. We all leaned that as young children.

Greece fits the description of a country wronged in the manner you describe - and it was wrong.

But that didn't give my grandfather the right to sneak in, steal somebody's identity and take advantage of the opportunities here.

He followed the law of the land. It is a gross fallacy to suggest that such a thing is not possible, necessary, or the Christian thing to do.

Is it less covenient? Difficult? Probably in many cases. But that doesn't give anybody the right to break the same laws that millions of others devote years following properly.

"....I can't quite see what America's countless past and present sins have to do with immigration policy. Are you really saying that America must, to be just, open her borders completely? Exercise no control over who is allowed in?

It isn't that I blame people particularly for sneaking in, but neither do I blame anybody for kicking them back out......"

Not at all, JDC. What I am advocating----from a Christian POV--- is that we have Balance and accept full responsibility for our position.

My point is that we have had a track-record of promoting ourselves and our World Agenda----and yes, sometimes at the expense of other countries. As a result we are now the single largest consumer of "toys" in the World. People who live in other countries want what we have and wish to come to this country for its opportunities. Certainly they would like to come here legally but the bureaucratic barriers are set---and kept--- artificially high. There is nothing "fair" about our immigration laws. They are purposely set to favor immigration by the monied and influential.

BTW: The State of Illinois, and CHicago in particular, are identified as "immigration sanctuaries". While this means little from a legal standpoint the condition exists to suggest that a person who comes to Illinois at least can get a fair shake, something not always available everywhere else.

Best Wishes,

Bruce

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How I feel about Capitalism is grist for another mill, Stuart. AFAIK we are talking about the nature of foreigners coming to another country looking for opportunity. I hold that we Americans have made much of our Judeo-Christian roots and the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. Apparently, when people actually take us up on our aspirational rhetoric we suddenly pull in the "welcome" mat.

My people, Rusyns from the Slovakian border country, were good enough to die in American Coal Mines and be scarred in the American Steel Mills, but their Faith was not acceptable to the American RC and RO Churches. My people kept the Law and supported their communities, and for their compliance they lived in the Squalid areas of the cities. If there was an "American Dream" to be had it was secured by these people IN SPITE of America and NOT because of it.

I find your lack of compassion disturbing. Not just because its expressed here on this forum, but because its arrogance and insensitivity is so widespread among Conservatives and Isolationists. I support your reconsidering your "I-got-mine-the-heck-with-everyone-else" attitude.

Best Wishes,

Bruce

Actually, I said "Capitalization", as in Someone likes to use Capital Letters to Make a Point.

As regards your absurd claims, go read some Thomas Sowell. It isn't so much race as it is Culture: Arab Americans (mostly Christians) have the second highest per capita income of any minority group in the United States, exceeding that of Americans of European descent. Blacks of West Indian descent are physically indistinguishable from Blacks of American ancestry, but the former are economically better off than whites. Among American blacks, those who finish high school, get a job and get married have incomes indistinguishable from white Americans.

As for Asians, they were treated like dirt when they arrived here, but today outperform just about everybody on standardized testing, college admissions and personal income--though even there, one must distinguish among different Asian nationalities, some of which do much worse. The same is true of Hispanics: you can hardly say that, e.g., Mexicans or Salvadoreans are in the same boat with Cubans or Argentines.

And then there are the Irish, whose arrival in this country was greeted with the kind of joy that usually accompanies an abscessed wisdom tooth. Signs saying "No Irish or Dogs Allowed" were quite common in respectable establishments, and much of the first century of Irish life in the U.S. was fought trying to break through social and religious barriers--as one book on the subject put it, "to become white".

They succeeded, as did most other ethnic groups in this country--including the Rusyn, most of whom have, in the second and third generations, broken out of the coal mines and steel mills and entered into the American middle class. Not that it stops some of them from whining about how badly they were treated--which is to say, no worse than my ancestors (Romanian Jews, Italians and Germans) were all treated in their turn.

Every group faces obstacles when they come to a new land. The thing about the United States is everybody gets a chance to climb over the obstacles and make what he can of himself. Those who fail to do so cannot blame the system, which is indifferent to where you came from, or what you look like. It is, as Sowell points out in his books, culture which determines who sinks and who swims.

Many American blacks and many Americans from the rural South share a common culture (Sowell calls it the Cracker Culture), and as a result, they share a common socio-economic profile. But those blacks and whites alike who transcended the Cracker Culture broke through the socio-economic limits faced by their peers. The system doesn't care about color, or religion, or ethnicity: it cares about results, which are the result of culture. Adapt to the culture, and prosper. Buck against it and fail. Very simple.

The problem facing minorities in Europe is utterly different from that in the United States, a country based on a common creed, and not on common blood. That's why someone like Nicholas Sarkozy can be born in France of parents who have lived in France for ages, and still be considered a Hungarian. It's why an Arab, or a Berber, or an African or an Indian or a Turk living in Western Europe will always be an outsider, even after he assimilates. Ask my ancestors, who thought they were good Germans or good Romanians, right up to the point they were marched into the gas chambers.

Thank you for confirming my POV, Stuart.

As you have affirmed, people of past generations were indeed "treated like dirt". I choose to have that practice stop with me, as much as I am able. I can't speak for anyone else.

Best Wishes,

Bruce