Illegal Immigrants and a Tree Off-Limits
Choosing between competing, clashing goods is usually a more difficult dilemma than choosing between good and evil. Making such choices requires wisdom. You must be able to choose the right option at the right time with the right object in mind, doing good toward the right people with the right motive in the right manner.
Take, for example, the immigration problem the United States is having at the moment. And let’s talk, not about the criminal element that crosses our borders, but just about people coming from horrific life situations in impoverished third world countries run by ruthless drug cartels. If any of us lived in such places, we’d want to find a safer and better life. These people are desperate enough to leave everything they know to risk entering the United States. It’s worth it to them to risk the consequences of breaking our immigration laws.
They are risking everything to seek something good.
Most of us know that this is what they are doing, and in our heart of hearts, we want to them helped, given relief. We want to see them escape their ugly circumstances and find a better life here. We want them to thrive.
However, we also know there are limits to the good that we can do for them. When you open the floodgates and stop vetting people, you overtax America’s resources and make life here worse for everyone. That ‘worse’ may still be far better than what these people came from, but it diminishes the goodness of the life that we have known. Is that an evil to be prevented – or to be born for a greater good?
Somewhere a line must be drawn, a balance obtained. Finding that line (and enforcing it) is a good thing to do too. It’s just not easy. People in our country are divided over it.
It is easy to talk about the issue in theory – what the government should do. It is more difficult if things get personal.
Suppose you have a family of illegal immigrants who have lived in your community for two years – people you have come to know. Their kids go to school with your kids. They are not committing crimes. They are working hard at low-paying jobs, living frugally, just getting by – and are so happy and thankful to be in America. They are nice people who have found a new life, a life beyond anything they had ever dreamed possible.
If the government came knocking, asking if you to help corral that family for deportation back to the hopeless treadmill of a horrific life in a chaotic third-world country, what would you do?
What should you do?
What is the GOOD thing to do – before God?
I don’t find those easy questions to answer. We try to make it easy by justifying one side as ‘good’ and pitting it against the other side which we demonize as evil. But that’s cheating. Both options are good things, and I believe that being certain you’ve made the right choice, the wise choice, in such a case may require wisdom greater than any of us possess.
Such dilemmas I find humbling. They remind me that I don’t have what it takes to be God – and why the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was off-limits to us.
Take, for example, the immigration problem the United States is having at the moment. And let’s talk, not about the criminal element that crosses our borders, but just about people coming from horrific life situations in impoverished third world countries run by ruthless drug cartels. If any of us lived in such places, we’d want to find a safer and better life. These people are desperate enough to leave everything they know to risk entering the United States. It’s worth it to them to risk the consequences of breaking our immigration laws.
They are risking everything to seek something good.
Most of us know that this is what they are doing, and in our heart of hearts, we want to them helped, given relief. We want to see them escape their ugly circumstances and find a better life here. We want them to thrive.
However, we also know there are limits to the good that we can do for them. When you open the floodgates and stop vetting people, you overtax America’s resources and make life here worse for everyone. That ‘worse’ may still be far better than what these people came from, but it diminishes the goodness of the life that we have known. Is that an evil to be prevented – or to be born for a greater good?
Somewhere a line must be drawn, a balance obtained. Finding that line (and enforcing it) is a good thing to do too. It’s just not easy. People in our country are divided over it.
It is easy to talk about the issue in theory – what the government should do. It is more difficult if things get personal.
Suppose you have a family of illegal immigrants who have lived in your community for two years – people you have come to know. Their kids go to school with your kids. They are not committing crimes. They are working hard at low-paying jobs, living frugally, just getting by – and are so happy and thankful to be in America. They are nice people who have found a new life, a life beyond anything they had ever dreamed possible.
If the government came knocking, asking if you to help corral that family for deportation back to the hopeless treadmill of a horrific life in a chaotic third-world country, what would you do?
What should you do?
What is the GOOD thing to do – before God?
I don’t find those easy questions to answer. We try to make it easy by justifying one side as ‘good’ and pitting it against the other side which we demonize as evil. But that’s cheating. Both options are good things, and I believe that being certain you’ve made the right choice, the wise choice, in such a case may require wisdom greater than any of us possess.
Such dilemmas I find humbling. They remind me that I don’t have what it takes to be God – and why the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was off-limits to us.