What one must first understand is that the Cardinal is a liberal first and a Catholic somewhere down the road. My only window into his soul is what he shows in public, and quite obviously he shares the liberal belief that the United States is capable of harboring a fourth of the population of Mexico, and the poorest quarter at that. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, let us say that he wishes to spare some very good people from one of the most corrupt governments in the world, a place where the ordinary Mexican has almost no chance to prosper.
The problem is that his premise is wrong. As the collapse of California shows, the United States can do no such thing. California by itself ranks, or used to rank, among the 7th wealthiest political units in the world. But it is staggering under the strain of supporting the new immigration. The Nativists in NYC in the 1850s got a bad name for opposing the invasion of their city by poor Irishmen,people who brought nothing with them but strong backs and their poverty. They blamed Catholicism for Irish poverty. I myself blame English colonial government whose ineptness left the Irish to starve after the potato famine hit. I blame the Mexican government for the poverty of the Mexicans, the central American governments for the poverty of the Central Americans. Anyway, the poor have fled north and there are simply too many of them. We are like the rich man who out of the kindness of his heart takes in a poor man from the street. Fine, he has plenty to share. But now the poor man wants his whole family to move in. Fine, still, But now his whole village wants to move in, and there is simply not enough room.
Bump!