Not-So-Holy Work
The road to hell is paved with good intentions — as the involvement of American religious organizations with human traffickers across our southern border demonstrates.
Witness Annunciation House, a Catholic charity sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over its failure to comply with document demands related to its stateside role in the migrant crisis.
Annunciation House offers shelter to migrants; Paxton wants to know if it has crossed the line into enabling human smuggling and called for relevant documents. Annunciation House refused to comply; Paxton’s suit seeks to strip the group of its ability to operate in Texas.
This raises thorny questions. Helping the vulnerable is noble, and illegal migrants are among the most vulnerable — but that vulnerability comes from their refusal to follow the law: They make up a growing population with no ability to work legally and lacking significant resources.
Worse, many migrants pay human traffickers to get them to the US border and across. These traffickers are often employed by narco cartels. And the cartels’ business model depends on a massive infrastructure on this side of the border ready to help the migrants along into America’s interior.
Wittingly or not, in other words, Annunciation House (and numerous other charities involved in migrant aid at the border) may be indirectly aiding the cartels by helping illegal entrants — providing a goal at the end of the expensive and dangerous journey the traffickers profit from.
Don’t forget about groups like Catholic Charities, which not only shelters migrants but then helps buy them bus or plane fare (in numbers that exceed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s wildest dreams) — and gets taxpayer money for doing so.
And a host of nonprofit-paid activists have spread the word far and wide on just what to say to have enough of an asylum claim to get released into the US interior.
But trafficked migrants often enter the country indebted to their traffickers, debts that must be repaid under threat of violence to the migrants or their family members.
Does aiding the progress of human beings into violent debt slavery count as a good work? At what point does providing yet another way station in this process shade into actual complicity?
Keep in mind that the compassion these groups and their backers invoke as their guiding principle doesn’t show up very visibly in the result of their actions. Encouraging an influx that’s crushing small border towns to the breaking point, hurting big cities across the nation and driving horrible crimes isn’t compassionate. Nor is greasing a path into sex work or the gray economy.
When progressives start shouting about compassion, in other words, beware: Human degradation is all but certain to follow.