As I was ruminating on the pros and cons of immigration and more specifically, our current situation, I think I’ve found a ‘real life’ allegory that seemed to put it all together.
Birdfeeders.
Hear me out.
Birdfeeders are delightful things. The person maintaining them gets to enjoy doing ‘good’ and gets to see beauty that might never have been available otherwise. While the birds get a rewarding break from their fight for survival.
Yet, all good things have downsides.
Birdfeeders can become frequented by ill birds who, while benefitting from the ‘easier’ meals unintentionally infect the high volume of fellow visitors. If they hadn’t all been invited, many would have avoided that ugly result. (Think unvaccinated and/or unvetted criminals or terrorists.)
Furthermore, often after a daily schedule of visitors are established, predators show up. (Think cartels and human traffickers.) If you’re lucky, it doesn’t happen right away but sometimes birdfeeders become ‘killing fields’ because of opportunistic predators. A ‘something good’ turned into a ‘something really bad’.
Offering a small number of backyard birds a personal meal, tossed out by hand, at an unscheduled and sporadic timing seems a better way to prevent disaster while promoting a measured ‘greater good’. This sounds like a better immigration strategy for exactly the same reasons. Having a controlled and measured process is the far more humane approach.
It should also be noted that providing the birdseed needed for birdfeeders is expensive. I’ve had to give it up in order to buy my own necessities for that reason. (My bird feeding endeavors usually were only during migration periods offering passersby some support.) I felt bad but the art of ‘survival’ for anyone boils down to priorities of need in the proper order. Overwhelming our schools and public support systems seems a terribly self-defeating side-effect of something that (as I’ve described) doesn’t benefit the most people.
There you have it:
Open borders are not humane to anyone involved and ultimately birdfeeders seldom are either.