The Venue for Compassion

In my last post, I stated that the reason you want stricter enforcement of immigration laws is so that you can have a more liberal quota of visas and legal immigration.

Although this position is compassionate at its core, it is very easy to frame the position as harsh. People who hold my position are wrongfully labeled xenophobic.

In reality, what is going on is an argument about the correct venue for compassion.

IMHO the Federal Government is the correct venue for compassion in immigration. Immigration is a national concern. You cannot leave immigration to a city or even a state government. If a city had the right to grant citizenship status, you are guaranteed to see a corrupt system with one city selling green cards for people who would then move throughout the nation.

One of the primary reasons that immigration has become such a mess is that progressive groups have played the game of trying to make a national issue a local issue. Gathering a group of people together to oppose a deportation is a very sensational action that makes the people involved in the protest as compassionate activists against an evil system.

The problem, of course, is that, as these local efforts become more organized and vocal, the national government starts becoming stricter. The loud local actions on behalf of the illegal immigrants seem to be taken as call for more illegal immigrants to violate the terms of their visa or to cross a border illegally.

Eventually, what happens, is the system becomes swamped. Even worse, the broken system actually starts leading to real xenophobia.

This is one of those ironic twists of reality. The actions of the loud progressive activists who pretend to altruistic compassion by undermining immigration laws end up creating a society with more real xenophobia than the people who were labeled xenophobes because they believe the national government is the proper venue for compassion in immigration.

Of course, the national government is not the proper venue for compassion in all aspects of life.

In my opinion, the proper venue for compassion in health care is as close to the patient as possible. That is the proper venue for compassion would be the family and the local community.

Once again I find myself at odds with modern progressive thought which seems to think that the Federal Government is the proper venue for compassion.

The Federal Government is distant from the patient and is not in a good position to actually apply compassion. Yet people who favor transferring control over health care decisions to Washington are labeled as "compassionate" and those who favor funding health care through local foundations and charities are labeled as "uncompassionate."

Ironically, again, as the role of the Federal government expands and taxes increase, health care costs have skyrocketed.

Independent doctors, who are incapable of dealing with the complexity of the Federal Goverment system, have all but disappeared in favor of extremely corrupt HMOs.

Anyway, I think this question of the correct venue for compassion is interesting.

The progressive community wants immigration (which appears to me to be a national issue) to be addressed at the local level. Then they want health care (which appears to me to be primarily a local issue) to be handled by a nationalized health authority.

Because I want immigration handled by the national government and individual health care handled by the individual, family and local community, I have earned the label of being a heartless bastard. While the people who routining choose the wrong venue for compassion seem to get lauded as caring.

It is a great puzzlement why the progressive mind seeks to address issues in the wrong forum.