The legality of their citizenship is ultimately irrelevant. We can devise any number of laws to make people criminals (just look at the population of our prison system thanks to the war on drugs). But our laws have no bearing on why they are here. Most of the people coming across our borders illegally don’t do it out of a criminal disregard for our laws, traditions, or anything like that. They are doing it because this is *supposed* to be the greatest nation in the world with the most freedom and opportunity. At least, that’s what we keep telling ourselves.
It’s foolish to assume that we don’t have the ability to take care of more people in this nation. It’s a propagandist *lie* that has been fed to us for generations. Just take a cursory glance at our GDP, the median household income, or any other metric involving financial resources. Anyone with even a slightly working knowledge of what it takes to feed, clothe, and even sustain a human being would be fooling themselves if they thought we couldn’t handle more. As a matter of fact, we have more empty homes in this nation than homeless people. It’s a damn shame that we keep telling ourselves this bullshit, especially while touting ourselves as a Christian nation.
China has FIVE TIMES as many people as we do and we still have more monetary and natural resources than they do. The entire continent of Africa has over a billion people and our nation outranks all of their nations COMBINED. Our current population is over 300million, and even the most *extreme* estimates put the number of illegal immigrants at 30million. The vast majority of our financial problems are due to the unending wars we didn’t have to engage in and the never-ending loans we take out to pour money into the pockets of the top 1%. It’s complete and utter nonsense to pretend like we can’t handle more people. The problem is our xenophobic attitude toward our fellow humans, not our supposed inability to deal with people who are already willing to work harder for less than any of us would tolerate.
The whole idea that we need to get our shit in order first before we can deal with other people is one of the biggest propagandist lies of our generation. People like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch have spent more money than most of us can even conceive to ensure that millions of people believe this lie. And it’s working. The richest people in all of history are alive right now, but we are focused on discriminating against people so poor that they are completely uprooting their lives and tearing apart their families just for the mere chance of making it happen here in America. And we — the descendants of illegal immigrants who committed genocide against the natives — are attempting to block these people from the same opportunities we have been blessed to receive.
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