To Own a Home
Picture this: you own a home, for which you pay a monthly mortgage fee, property taxes, and an array of utilities expenses each month. While you obviously don’t like such burdens (and many more) which come with home ownership, let’s say you have a family, and are proud of the security and comfort that owning a home brings them.
Let’s add to this story. You live in a very safe neighborhood, but nonetheless, keep your doors locked at all times, just in case of a potential intruder. For someone who is a parent, this would be a perfectly reasonable course of action; who wouldn’t want to keep their family as safe as it could be, and keep people who they don’t know at all from entering their home?
There are many who extrapolate the idea of locking the doors of one’s home to the immigration policy of the United States. After all, shouldn’t we all treat our country the same way we treat our own homes? Simply put, shouldn’t we “lock the doors” for our own safety?
The Wrong Analogy
One anti-refugee Facebook group certainly thinks so - posting a photograph with a quote that reads “Not taking refugees & closing our borders doesn’t mean we’re mean. I lock my doors every night. I don’t lock them because I hate the people outside. I lock them because I LOVE the people INSIDE!!!”
Others go further, arguing that those who support leniency towards refugees and migrants, but who would not be willing to host them in their own homes, are hypocrites. The same group mentioned earlier makes this point in another post, which reads “For those who support the migrant invasion heading our way, please post your home address. They’ll need a place to live.”
This line of thought may seem reasonable at face value, but ask yourself this: if there was a group of nearly 330 million people, and you had the option to host any single person from this group in your own home, without any background information about who that person would be, would you do it?
The overwhelming majority of people would, understandably, answer “no” to this question. However, the number provided of 330 million people is about the current population of people already living in the United States of America.
Simply put, when asked if they would host someone in their own home which they didn’t know personally, most people would answer in the negative, even if the potential guest at hand was a citizen of their own country.
A Real Immigration Argument
Furthermore, this criticism points to the fundamental flaw in the country-home analogy as it relates to immigration: a nation making the conscious, collective choice to accept refugees and migrants is a completely different thing than individuals directly hosting such migrants in their own homes.
No major figure who supports accepting migrants and refugees into the United States has ever suggested that individual Americans ought to open up the doors to their houses.
Rather, immigration advocates argue that Americans, collectively, should make the decision to provide for the processing, care, and resettlement of migrants seeking a better life in the United States.
They believe that this not only is a moral imperative, but would also be a boon for those already living and working in the United States. The question at hand is one of what goals the collective resources of the United States (through taxes) should go towards.
By misconstruing the pro-immigrant position as saying that Americans should host migrants in their own homes, those opposed to immigration cheapen the seriousness of any discussion on immigration policy.
If the anonymous person I allowed to live with me became a financial burden that I could not support, I would have preferred to have known about that before opening the door. I could have saved myself and this person emotional and financial hardship.
The flaw in your response is that it still accepts the premise of the analogy – namely, that just in the same way a country can accept a largely anonymous group of migrants, you would accept an anonymous person into your home in the first place. The point of this piece was to demonstrate that this is not to case. The beginning of your comment “If the anonymous person I allowed to live with me…” shows this is purely theory, because almost nobody would accept an anonymous person into their home in the first place, but it is a very normal thing for nations to accept largely anonymous migrants. My argument is that criticisms such as: “any of these celebrities who want to accept refugees should just be quite, because they would not host them in their mansions” are foolish, because the two are simply not comparable. Now this being said, I’m assuming what you are getting at is that the United States itself cannot support the “financial burden” of hosting refugees. I reject the premise of this as well, as it assumes that the acceptance of refugees and migrants is in and of itself a long-term financial burden, as opposed to something which ultimately will benefit the United States from an economic perspective (which the facts largely show). However, that is a topic for another time.