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(Revised my previous blog post of the same name and expanded on the theme, also making a video version.)
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Around the world, right now, there are countless souls who look up to America as a symbol of liberty and opportunity. They risk life and limb, traveling across oceans and deserts to come here for the chance at a better future for themselves and their children. However, this mass migration only ever seems to flow in one direction, and it is not without consequence. We cannot take in seven billion people, and so some practical limit must be agreed upon, to say nothing of what to do about all those left standing outside the castle walls when we raise the drawbridge.
While it is good and noble to help people in need – to help refugees and asylum seekers – the question emerges of whether we are really doing good by taking in these people.
Those who make the trek to our shores are often among the best and brightest within their homelands. Highly competent and resourceful people. The kinds of people we generally regard as fine Americans. The kinds of people we are proud of, and which we loudly proclaim we want. We are often told of the economic and cultural value that they bring with them. But then, if they are really as valuable as they claim, could they likewise be just as valuable at home, or even more-so?
In a way, mass migration is rather exploitative and self-serving, and I don’t just mean in the sense that mega corporations use them as cheap labor. We take the best the world has to offer, and many of these people are fleeing from hell. Through their suffering, these people come to learn to value liberty – but the reality is that, in doing so, we make those other nations poorer for it.
By giving migrants an out and relieving them of the pressures to fix things at home, they are never forced to confront the evils they are fleeing from, and so those problems never get solved. Those places inevitably devolve into further chaos and misery, creating a vicious cycle that spirals all the way down to the darkest depths of hell. Further abuse and tyranny, as the industrious, intelligent, freedom-loving people all leave to come here. To America. As such, we doom those that remain to a life far worse than before, all in the name of compassion and kindness.
Of course, it’s a difficult question. How to fix things over there so that people don’t have to come here?
In the past, we have tried many things and all of them have failed. We have tried economic relief, military intervention, assassination of bad actors, training rebels, isolation, colonialism, conquest, trade, embargoes, occupation, supplying weapons and resources to locals … all of these methods of interference in the domestic affairs of foreign nations have failed to reproduce abroad that special formula of American exceptionalism. Because the fact is that you simply cannot help someone who doesn’t want to be helped; and part of what make us who we are is the fact that we were born backed into a corner, baptized in the fires of our own bloody revolution, pledging our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to the cause, because our love of self-determination was so strong and so passionate that no one could deny us what we felt was our divine birthright:
A future of freedom for all.
Unless and until we can instill such a fire in the bellies of foreign nationals, they will never have what we have, for they will be unwilling to do all that is necessary. To do all that we do and have done to get where we are.
With such a fervent spirit seeming to wither in our veins at home, we now struggle even to rekindle the flame in our own hearts, let alone abroad; and yet our world is growing smaller by the day, such that we can no longer afford to ignore what our neighbors are doing. Everything affects us, and what we do affects the entire rest of the world. Where America goes, the rest of the world follows.
So … what else can be done?
People often think that, in order to be free, they must pick up and move to another physical location. To leave their homes and move to America because there’s something special here. Or to leave and go elsewhere if America ultimately falls. Or if they don’t like it here. But what they fail to realize is this …
America is an idea, not an address.
Even if the sky fell tomorrow and sank this entire continent into the sea, if even one person remained who held the idea of America in their hearts, she would continue to live on and be reborn as a phoenix from the ashes.
Just as we teach our own children to love liberty and free enterprise, and just as the postmodernists and progressives try to teach our kids that everything is racist and that we should all hate ourselves … Ultimately, society will come to hold whatever values we teach our children, and if we wish for America to flourish and thrive, we must teach others to learn who she is and who she has the potential to become.
It’s a tired cliché at this point, but it is also a fact that: The children are our future.
I am a big believer in the idea that: “If people knew better, they’d do better.” There are those that say, “In an age of information, ignorance is no excuse,” but I put it to you that some people are in such bad straights that even if all the resources and information to solve their problems is out there, they still might need help learning it exists and learning how and where to find it. And also in learning how to discern good from bad, and how to apply it to their own lives.
Rather than importing people, we should be exporting the idea of America. Of liberty, free enterprise, and egalitarianism. Politics is downstream of culture and so, just as we must work on the hearts and minds of people in this country, so too must we work on them abroad.
The history of America is one of turning our fiercest enemies into our best friends. We have done this nearly everywhere we go, from France and Great Britain to Germany and Japan, from Canada to Mexico and beyond. In our history, we have at least three examples of countries split down the middle – controlling for language, culture, geography, and demographics – wherein one half adopted violent authoritarianism in some fashion, while the other practiced something closer to what we have in America.
I am, of course, talking about Germany, Korea, and China if you include places like Hong Kong.
We know that our story, our values, are better – that they have been tried and withstood the test of time. They are rich seeds needing only fertile soil to grow, and the most-fertile soil is often made of compost and crap. Of garbage and rot. So these countries and others are ripe for planting, if only someone would come along with the seed.
Doubtless, you are familiar with the concept of missionaries. Even now, there are those who preach the ministry of liberty online, but we know how Big Tech and the media-political complex work against us, to say nothing of foreign tyrannical regimes. What we need right now, and what might ultimately work in these other countries, are courageous ambassadors and missionaries – not of God, but of the American Dream. People who will go out into the world and make Americans of all nations. To preach the good news of the right to free speech and to own the fruits of your labor. Who will administer the sacrament of due process and chant: “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.”
And to teach the children there – as we would teach our children here – such that new generations grow up to desire and value freedom, and who will fight for it themselves, even giving up their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor so that those who remain don’t have to. In this way, we shall bring peace and prosperity to a world in need.
In this way, we shall make America greater than ever, and build a future of freedom for all.