What did you do for community this summer (besides working for reduced immigration)?

This month, I led dozens of teenagers for the 21st summer in helping poor Americans with housing needs. 

I suspect that a great many of you have been similarly involved in compassionate acts in your local and national community this year.  Great devotion to community is one of the reasons many NumbersUSA activists work so hard for lower immigration levels.  

When I say this, the open-borders crowd often challenges me and suggests that we immigration-reductionists don’t have any record of compassion for our communities (other than our claim for what our immigration work can do).

Let’s see what we can show . . .

Please write a brief comment about your compassion for community this summer — and earlier.

I think it would be an encouragement to each other now, and in the future, to put together a little record of examples of the types of community-minded actions in which our NumbersUSA activists engage.

Please write in the Comments section below.  Enjoy reading the comments of others and then come back later to read the ones that are added after yours.

Don’t imitate my wordiness below but give a short general outline. 

Your acts may be connected with a service club, a veterans group, a religious organization, a neighborhood association, a government entity, a school or just be a personal act.  Your service to your local or national community this year can be a specific project or an on-going activity — large or small.

Pres. George H.W. Bush talked about this as a thousand points of light.  Pres. John F. Kennedy admonished us not to focus on what our government could do for us but what we could do for our country.  Remember that “country” is a word for “national community.”

At another time, I will ask you what you do for people in other national communities.  But this excercise is what you do for people within the national community that is the United States of America. 

Concept of community is a major divide between us and the HIGH-immigration enthusiasts.

The globalists among the high-immigration enthusiasts often brag about their lack of parochialism and their commitment to “all of humanity.”  They often accuse us of selfishness because we believe in a national community that has special responsibilities for the people within it.

I think it is important for us to regularly point out these differences so that the national debate on immigration can be seen in the light of these widely divergent views about national community. This is a major divide in our ethical philosophy.  While some immigration enthusiasts will proudly note that they don’t believe in community, I think most will tend to shrink back when publicly pushed to acknowledge that they don’t really believe in the concepts of national community which require an immigration policy that puts the needs of those in our community first.

One major problem I have with full-philosophical globalism is that it seems to let people off the hook for caring about vulnerable and hurting human beings that are in their own neighborhoods, cities, counties, regions and country. Many philsophers through the ages, including among all religions, have affirmed the ethics of a hierarchy of responsibility, first to one’s family, then neighbors and then on to wider circles of community.  Most ethical systems historically have had disdain for those who neglect people in their own community who are hurting.

I truly believe on the basis of much hard data and logic that probably the single most important thing that we can do for the poor in our community is to dramatically reduce immigration, put millions back to work, tighten the labor market so that productivity and wages provide at least a minimal dignified income for every American who (as Pres. Clinton said) works hard and plays by the rules.

Unemployment, low wages, poor benefits especially leave widows in great need

My church’s teenagers this summer once again worked in Appalachia (as we have many other years, in four states).  We’ve also worked many years with urban poverty in Richmond and rural poverty in the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Two of our partner home owners were widows who were in danger of losing their modest houses due to water coming through bad roofs.  Another widow had lost insurance on her house (her only asset) because of degradation due to lack of maintenance over the last decade.   And so it went, with nine homeowners we helped.  The widows’ long-departed husbands had been part of the extraction economy, paying too little with too little benefits to build up any more assets than the houses themselves.  And their children were also part of that economy, their earning power severely limited by rolling unemployment, low wages and injuries.

In Appalachia, federal immigration policy certainly isn’t the top or major direct factor in the difficulties.  Nonetheless, even in Appalachia many of the skilled jobs that once had been better paying have been diminished to low pay as companies have entered the area with increasingly foreign-born labor.  The biggest problem in Appalachia as in other swaths of major unemployed and underemployed populations is that the nation as a whole has a labor glut.  The national economy does not appear to need the labor of these working-age people.  Thus, their value (wages) remains exceptionally low.  If the coastal states were not awash in more than 20 million foreign-born workers, companies in the those areas might expand or locate in the perpetually underemployed parts of our national community (which are found particularly the interior).  But Congress keeps pumping more and more foreign workers primarily into the coastal regions of those coastal states.  The same phenomenon is at work in companies not seeking employees among the incredibly unemployed Black American population, because it is easier for them to hire among the burgeoning foreign workforce provided by Congress.

I believe the most important thing I can do for all underpaid and unemployed workers is to manage NumbersUSA to be the most effective possible in reducing total immigration numbers so as to begin to tighten the labor market.

But that isn’t going to provide dividends fast enough for somebody with water pouring through the roof, is it?

So, I’m proud of our teenagers and their work this month in dramatically improving the daily lives of these nine homeowners.  And I’m proud of all of you who volunteer to improve the lives of the less fortunate in longer term ways through various kinds of education efforts and in band-aids like soup kitchens.

You do not live just for yourself.  You are a member of a local and national community. You feel some responsibility for others within that community. And act on that feeling.

Please add your examples to the ones already displayed below.

I really like some of the observations included below, such as this one about the importance of contributing to the strong civic life of one’s local community:

“Strong communities build a strong nation, and mass immigration undercuts all our efforts to make our communites better and safer places to live.”

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA