God protect us from the "well-intentioned ..."

If you fool enough people by appealing to their better nature – their desire to be compassionate and generous – you can gain broad public support for just about anything.  

It makes no difference how cynical your objectives are. Or how laughably shallow you are yourself. Americans are suckers for heart-tugging images of dirty, snotty-nosed kids, down-and-out junkies, single mothers, the unemployed, the disabled, the destitute, and just about anybody in tears.    

To bend this to your advantage, all you need to do is appear equally heartbroken by what you see. If you promise to make things better, to stop the suffering, Americans will stand with you. Nobody wants to be accused of being heartless and cruel to those in need.    

It’s one of our most admirable traits as a nation. Americans as a whole will open their hearts and their checkbooks to alleviate suffering not just here, but almost anywhere in the world. 

Unfortunately, our good nature is also one of our greatest weaknesses. 

Americans’ desire to help, to be generous, to be compassionate, has been exploited by cynical politicians and special interest groups for their own purposes for decades. They know that if they can craft the right imagery that breaks our hearts they can more easily manipulate us.     

The Democrats and their allies in Hollywood and the press have been especially adept at this. They know that this is no longer the Age of Reason, but the Age of Emotion. Feelings trump facts. Perceptions equal reality. Rational analysis loses to impassioned pleas. Closing one’s eyes to what’s right or wrong – or even illegal or illegal – is justified by claiming higher “moral” and “ethical” values. Laws selectively deemed “unjust” can be ignored with impunity. 

The pitch is always to show some compassion. Don’t be so heartless. Don’t be selfish. How can you not want to help? Isn’t this what America is all about? How can you live with yourself? Put yourself in their place – wouldn’t you do the same? What’s the big deal? Where’s the harm?

What they’re really saying is this: Don’t question; just give us what we want. 

Forget about the law. Forget about who will pay for what we want. Forget about the long-term consequences. Forget about actually solving the problem. Just give us what we want. 

And don’t pay attention to the details. 

Right now the cause du jour is what to do about all the illegal immigrants flooding into our country. But there’s also the problem of what to do with all the illegal immigrants already here. 

Carefully consider what’s really happening. Watch how this is being covered. You’ll see how Democrats, immigrant-rights (??) groups and the general press are setting this up to make us all feel so guilty and compassionate that we’ll ignore the facts.

So we’re seeing the dirty, snotty-nosed kids in donated t-shirts. The teenage girls. The pregnant women. We’re hearing stories of how they came here to escape the violence and terror in their homeland. How some of the women may have been sexually abused while traveling here. We’re seeing footage of crowded, makeshift shelters with kids, teenagers and pregnant women sleeping on the floor. Then we’re seeing crowds of angry people with hateful signs jeering at the buses trying to carry these poor souls to other shelters.    

How awful. It would be truly sad if it weren’t so manufactured to play on our sympathies. 

Not that it isn’t sad that these people are in bad shape. They are. The kids in particular have a host of infections, lice and other nasties that need medical treatment. And who doesn’t feel sorry for the pregnant women?

Until you realize one thing: None of this had to happen.

We could have made it next to impossible to enter our southern border illegally. Other countries far less sophisticated than us have done it. So could we. For about the same money Obama now wants to spend on housing, feeding, treating, and providing lawyers for the latest wave, we could have secured our borders with walls, more Border Patrol, and more sophisticated technology. 

But we didn’t. Because special interests really don’t want us to. They want things to continue to spiral out of control until the rest of us simply are overwhelmed and give up. So on one hand they want to promote the human tragedy on our borders to pull at our heartstrings; on the other they want to make it seem like there’s absolutely nothing we can do about all the illegals here already. Might as well just roll over and grant them all amnesty – what’s the alternative?   

None of this is new. Pregnant women know that if they deliver their child on US soil, it becomes an American citizen, no matter how the mother got into the US. This is an age-old tactic illegals all know well.  Once that baby’s here, then it’s pretty much a done deal that mom gets to stay, then dad, then siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, in-laws, etc. That’s also why they are sending their kids here hoping they get to stay and be anchors to bring over everybody else.     

What is new, however, is that this latest tsunami of illegals can be directly attributed to the message this administration has sent out that if you get here you can stay here. Plus, we’ll take care of you. Not those specific words, but by refusing to prosecute illegals and by essentially granting citizenship to the children of illegals. Free healthcare is another big attraction; illegals know they can’t be refused free medical care at any emergency room in this country.   

A lot of otherwise decent, well-intentioned people are being intentionally misled about what is actually happening on the border. These illegals aren’t escaping violence in their homeland; a recent poll among them showed almost all of them believed that getting here means they can stay here. Nor are they – as Obama said recently – the best and the brightest. And honestly, most of the illegals already here weren’t the best and brightest either. 

The reality is that these people are intentionally breaking our laws. When they get away with that, they are gaming the system to avoid deportation or criminal penalties and to receive benefits they haven’t earned nor contributed toward. They are driving up our education and healthcare costs. They are not contributing “vitality” to our society as some claim. They are driving down wages among our own minorities and poor. In many cases, they are taking their earnings here and sending those back to their home countries instead of putting it back into our economy. 

    

There’s nothing in it for us. The well-intentioned – yet hopelessly clueless – need to step aside this time around and not get sucked into this artificial passion play. 

What we’re seeing today is a carefully scripted play on our emotions. That’s probably the thing that infuriates me most. These people didn’t have to come here. They weren’t forced to leave their homelands to survive.  They were intentionally lured here. All for show. 

I am sorry for their suffering. I am sad for their situation. But I am not responsible. Nor am I willing to house, clothe, feed and support them now that they’re here, or pay for lawyers to argue for them in hearings they never plan to attend. 

This one is Obama’s and the Democrats’ from start to finish. They caused it. They own it.

And you can be absolutely certain their motives were not well-intentioned.