But let's take it another step, eh. Why help these particular people as opposed to any of, say, 5 billion others?

Got a sad tale of woe involving immigrant A, who came here illegally to work as a farm laborer, brought his family (also illegally), son has XXX, daughter is YYY, etc? We can go out into the world and find MILLIONS of people in worse shape than Immigrant A. This is a losing battle so don't play it. The world is full of people who would be better off in the US as it is currently constituted than they would be in their own countries.

But all of us in the US would be worse off if all of them are allowed to come here.

We are not obligated to let in everybody who wants in. It's that simple.

"Brownback, a Roman Catholic, says he approaches immigration from a humanitarian perspective..."

So his views seem to be heavy on the compassion/religion angle.

Well, OK.

But as for that, I'll wrap it all up together and concede they're answering to a higher power, pretty much leaving it there.

Except for pointing out that such views are short on logic and common sense, and we really cannot be making such important decisions and policy based only or mostly on pious, feel-good religionism.

Also, people like Brownback present a false dilemma/dichotomy: either we help aliens by allowing them to come to or remain in the US, or we are not being Christian or 'compassionate'. Obviously, this is not true -- there are other ways to help.

Ah, the beauty of diversity.

Below is my letter printed at VDare regarding Senator Brownback and his "compassion":

We all recall that Kansas Senator Brownback, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was big on bringing a multitude of Somali Bantu refugees to the US.

When government officials were looking for a place to settle them, they came up with Kansas. They must have thought, "Why not? Wasn't Senator Brownback a leading proponent of bringing them here?"

But Brownback quickly put a stop to these plans: not a single one was to be settled in Kansas. They were "not right" for Kansas according to the senator.

So they are right for, oh, say, Virginia?

Blacksburg, VA, my hometown, has accepted several Somali Bantu refugee families.

My next door neighbor, a kind and caring person and the mother of three young children, became part of a committee to help them settle in and to get the children enrolled in school. One of her tasks was to take some of the women shopping.

One day I ran into her in the local grocery store where she was with a Bantu woman with two very young children and a girl who looked as if she might be in her early teens. She introduced me to the woman, who didn't speak English, so we both nodded and smiled.

Later that day when my neighbor and I were in our front yards, I asked her how she helps them shop when language had to be a major problem.

She replied that X spoke English quite well. X, she explained, was the pregnant one.

I said that I had thought that X was a young girl. She was wearing a flowing robe and I couldn't tell she was pregnant. My neighbor agreed that she was a young girl