Immigration Control Is Smart, Not Un-Christian

The current goings-on in Springfield, Ohio, and the surrounding area have captured national media attention. Stories of tens of thousands of immigrants, unceremoniously dumped by the Biden-Harris administration into a sleepy heartland town of barely 60,000, causing traffic accidents, clogging up welfare and social services, devouring the housing market, and leaving native-born American citizens homeless and financially overburdened — to say nothing of the rumors of household pets being feasted upon — have reignited the inexplicably-contentious debate over immigration and border control.  

Among the ranks of unrestricted-immigration apologists are those who cite some perverted form of Christian morality as justification for standing by meekly while one’s own nation is invaded. Social media in particular is crawling with folks spouting off variations of “If you struggle with letting immigrants into your country, you clearly haven’t let Jesus into your heart.” (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: What Attacks on Catholic Churches Reveal About Society)

Never mind that most of those trotting out these imbecilic cliches aren’t Christian themselves and wouldn’t dare to adhere to Christ’s teachings on, say, lust, divorce, adultery, or the Eucharist.

What Is Demanded of Christians?

Of course, the argument that Christian charity demands allowing corrupt regime elites to airdrop hordes of third-world insurgents into your neighborhood is imbecilic. In his treatise on charity in the encyclopedic Summa Theologiae, the great St. Thomas Aquinas explains that charity (or love) is subject to order, and that one actually has an obligation to love some people more than others — or at least before others:

One’s obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits in acting against that love. Now it is a more grievous sin to act against the love of certain neighbors, than against the love of others. Hence the commandment (Leviticus 10:9), “He that curseth his father or mother, dying let him die,” which does not apply to those who cursed others than the above.

Therefore we ought to love some neighbors more than others.… We must, therefore, say that, even as regards the affection we ought to love one neighbor more than another. The reason is that, since the principle of love is God, and the person who loves, it must needs be that the affection of love increases in proportion to the nearness to one or the other of those principles. For … wherever we find a principle, order depends on relation to that principle.

In other words, charity is ordered by God. While we do have an obligation to love all those made in the image and likeness of God, that obligation is strongest in a particular order: God must be loved first, followed by our own selves (not, Aquinas explains, in a selfish or miserly fashion, but in the matter of tending to our spiritual nature), and then followed by those closest to us, such as family, friends, and countrymen.

Aquinas explains that “friendship among blood relations is based upon their connection by natural origin, the friendship of fellow-citizens on their civic fellowship, and the friendship of those who are fighting side by side on the comradeship of battle.” He concludes, “Wherefore in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers.”

Americans have an obligation to love their country and to love their fellow-citizens, even above non-citizens, just as a father has an obligation to love his wife and children above the homeless of his town; and if a father were to come home one night to find a homeless man in his own house, eating his food, and terrifying his wife and children, Christians would indeed agree that the father has an obligation — not merely a right or an option, but an obligation — to evict the intruder.

Defending Your Home Is Christian

The leftist mantra of multiculturalism — the lotus eaters’ droning that all cultures are good and worthy — is not so much a means of seeking out the good and the worthiness of other cultures, but of convincing the masses that all cultures are interchangeable, that all are one and the same.

This is, of course, patently false. After all, the Haitian immigrants receiving government-funded benefits and renting two-story, multi-bedroom houses in Ohio wouldn’t agree that the crime-ridden slums they escaped from in their home country are equivalent to life in America. Different cultures have different attributes and customs, and those unique cultural attributes and customs are, at times, in need of defense. It is for this reason that Pope Pius XII wrote, “It is quite legitimate for nations to treat their differences a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs.” (READ MORE: Trump Waffles on Florida’s Abortion Amendment)

Demanding that corrupt bureaucrats not dump 20,000 immigrants from the third world into your backyard is not un-Christian. However, defending the home of your family, the nation in which your children and their children are to grow up and live and love and work and play, protecting and preserving the characteristics and customs unique to your nation and your region, these things are assuredly Christian. These things must, of course, be done with love, never with malice, but Christians do have an obligation to do them.

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