According to press release, Jonathan Duffy, president of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) recently joined hundreds of “interfaith world leaders” at a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, “to discuss fostering inclusivity and countering hate speech to enhance the protection of religious minorities, refugees, and migrants.”
In a speech, Duffy highlighted four “C’s” that he believes drive migration: concentration, corruption, conflict, and climate change. By “concentration,” Duffy was referring to the concentration of wealth and jobs that draws immigrants to the cities. The second “C” was for corruption. The third “C” stood for conflict, and Duffy mentioned war-torn countries like Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Myanmar and Afghanistan. The final “C” denoted climate change; Duffy claimed that temperatures are more extreme, and that this is causing land and fresh water to become scarcer.
Duffy argued that nations should adopt a more pro-immigrant policy, and that people should not see immigrants as our enemies. “Many have made valuable contributions to our society,” he says. “Google was started by a Russian immigrant; the genius behind Apple, Steve Jobs, was the son of a Syrian immigrant, and they are not the exception.”
“Who is speaking up for justice for all?” asks Duffy. “Who is having compassion for the less privileged and the marginalized? If not us, then who? If we use our combined voice it is a force that cannot be ignored. We also have a role to play in our own faith communities, to change the dialogue of hate and ignorance to peace, love, and acceptance.”
Duffy’s opinion regarding what drives immigration strikes me as highly questionable, to say the least. His first factor, concentration, can help explain migration from the countryside to the cities within nations, but such movement of people is not controversial in the least, nor a concern to the international community.
Corruption is a problem in many countries, but not one particularly segregable from other economic and quality of life issues that cause economic migrants to move from third world countries to first world countries like the United States.
Armed conflict is an important driver of mass dislocation, but globally much of this conflict is due to jihad warfare and the bloody borders of the Dar al-Islam. That Islam doesn’t play nice with other religions, but seeks everywhere and always to be supreme and impose sharia law, and dhimmitude on non-Muslims, argues conclusively against allowing mass Muslim immigration into the Christian West. And yet, as we’ve pointed out before, ADRA has argued for just such immigration. In wanting the West to take in Muslim immigrants, ADRA is aligned with Dan Jackson.
And the idea that “climate change” is a significant driver of migration is risible nonsense. It’s something that people who hobnob at international conferences in Geneva say to signal that they’re bien pensants, members of the club. Climate has less influence on where people live than ever before; millions live where they wouldn’t have a century ago because we can control the climate in our homes, offices, shopping malls and automobiles. Well, for now we can . . . until the global warmongers reverse all the progress of the past century and force the masses to live in discomfort in order to “save the planet.”
Duffy is making a political statement, and it is clear, since his examples are Americans—Sergei Brin, Steve Jobs—that the statement is aimed at the United States. (Although, Sergei Brin isn’t exactly my idea of a beneficial immigrant, now that Google is tweaking its search algorithms to discriminate against conservatives, Christians, and anyone who wants to be candid about Islam.)
It seems like Duffy, an Aussie, ought to preach to his own country first, since Australia makes would-be immigrants wait on an offshore island until they are processed and approved, whereas those who seek asylum to the U.S. (over 90 percent of whom are economic migrants, not persecuted refugees) are released into the interior to await a hearing for which few of them ever show up.
The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is at its highest level since 1910, with the approximately 44 million immigrants living in the United States representing 13.5 percent of the overall population. And that’s if you accept the official statistics, which takes faith considering that the authorities don’t know how many undocumented immigrants are currently living in the country, only that it is somewhere between eleven and 30 million, with recent best-guesses around 22 million.
The combination of mass immigration driving down wages and the outsourcing of our manufacturing to China and other third world countries has crushed the white working class in America, which can no longer find meaningful work, and has even seen its life expectancy decline. These folks are dying “deaths of despair” from suicide, drugs and alcohol.
My immigration policy, driven by my “compassion for the less privileged and the marginalized,” to wit, my fellow citizens who are dying deaths of despair, is to stop all immigration, legal and illegal, for about two generations, until the foreign masses who are here now can be acculturated and Americanized, wages can rebound, and the middle class can recover its once-dominant position in American life. Right now, the U.S. is third-worldizing itself at a rapid pace with California—mostly tech billionaires and poor immigrants with a thin middle class of government employees and service professionals—as the canary in the coal mine.
That’s just my opinion, of course, and no better than anyone else’s. But why should I, or anyone who believes as I do be expected to contribute money to ADRA when they advocate political positions I oppose?
ADRA is an object lesson about the arc of liberal religion. Doctrine—orthodoxy—gives way to good works—orthopraxy—which gives way to doing good as a substitute for doctrinal orthodoxy. Doing good works eventually gives way to advocating for others to do good works, which eventually gives way to political advocacy, and eventually to dangerous utopian totalitarianism. ADRA is near the end of this arc.