Pragmatism

Most of us would like to claim to be humanitarian, after all it's the essence of who we are  to be collaborative to others. To be identified as humanitarian is to rank alongside the good in people.  To love ones fellow man and women is a religious ideal, right at the base of ones understanding of what is Gods will.
The immigration debate brings this human ideal into conflict with that old devil "pragmatism".
How do we square the circuit with what we know we should do as a response to someone else's suffering and the side effect it has on us.
To put ones hand in the pocket and make a contribution to aid, even the running costs of ones own local charity is one thing but to give ones time and energy to actually joining the ranks of helpers or accepting the consequences of taking in people with needs, which will stretch the resource for your own people, is another.
In a perfect world our leaders would have our needs at the forefront of their own priorities but this is rarely the case and we see with the inadequate building program for affordable houses or to train enough medical people or school teachers that the politicians gaze is elsewhere.
We have chronic shortages in all these and other fields of social support and at the end of the day it's a numbers game.
If we have shortages and we haven't the money to pay for the improvements needed why on earth would we be so generous to people who are foreign to us.
Until we can rectify our own mismanagement in the supply of these fundamental cogs in the machinery of modern social provision we should have a blanket stop to any more 'incoming' from where ever they come.
This is the Australian view and we would worse than to consider that even though they took some brick backs from their policy of turning people around and sheltering them off shore in Papua New Guinea it sent out the message, "we are in charge".
Our own government clearly are not in charge. Irrespective of the agreement of the free movement of people in the EU we combine this with our responsibility with the UN charter regarding people fleeing a war zone at our peril. These responsibilities, which are at base ideological, counter our responsibilities to our own people and we have to face up to the pragmatic fact that we shouldn't put a 'stranger' before our 'own family'.
I'm sure there's a tract in the bible which echo's this.