Preserving the inheritance

Our inheritance has been turned over to aliens, our homes to foreigners. Lamentations 5:2

American Christians, it seems, are conflicted over the issue of immigration. On the one hand, we see all people as carrying the imago dei, which confers the same dignity and worth on all, regardless where they were born. The disparity between the abundance of our life in the U.S. and the lives of many around the world cause many to accept large numbers of immigrants, legal or otherwise, into our nation.

Such compassion, where it is sincerely felt, is commendable but wrongheaded. In the hopes of providing a better life for untold millions around the world, we've diluted the very prospects America once had to offer. Our infrastructure groans under the load of a rapidly expanding population--one that no longer sees a need to conform to commonly accepted norms of social behavior. There is no expectation of a covenant between the newcomer and those for whom this land was an inheritance by birth. Vanishing American has some detailed thoughts on that inheritance (thoughts, in fact, that inspired this post).

America once thought of itself as a shining example to the rest of the world. Now we hide the heroes of our past and bow before those of other cultures, in an effort to be "diverse." But do we really help the rest of the world by allowing it to overwhelm and water down what was once called the 'last best hope of mankind?' Is it not better to defend this bastion against the normal degraded state of the world, so that it serves as both beacon and a base from which to carry hope into other lands? Or are we so lazy we'd rather let the "huddled masses" come here in force to pick clean the bones of the land they thought would save them?