TEXT JOIN TO 77022

Progressives and Their Surrogate Children

It is not hard to understand why pro-abortion politicians such as U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) encourage illegal immigrants to pour across our southern border.

They want to put them on a path to citizenship as quickly as possible, thus bolstering the Democratic Party’s voter rolls and creating a permanent liberal-left—which is to say, pro-abortion—majority in Congress. For them, to paraphrase Barack Obama, illegal aliens are the “change that we have been waiting for.”

Wall Street’s hunger for cheap immigrant labor is also well known. Millions of workers happy to work for minimum wage or below may not be good for American workers, but it certainly boosts Wall Street’s bottom line.

Two-thirds of new arrivals, legal and illegal, go on food stamps and other forms of welfare not long after they arrive in the country, depending on the state’s rules and regulations (California is very different from Arizona). This shifts a large part of the burden of caring for them away from their employers and onto the struggling middle class.

It is a great deal for employers, including those who hire them as household help, since it means they can get away with paying them even less. But it’s a rotten deal for the rest of us.

I remain puzzled, however, over the refusal of the abortion-minded to defend our borders.

We can pretty much rule out any selfless impulse to help the downtrodden right at the outset.

As a group, abortion advocates, like progressives in general, are not known either for their charity or their empathy. Their charitable giving as a percentage of their income is lower—much lower—than that of middle-class Americans. Their empathy—at least for other human beings as opposed to, for instance, stray dogs and cats—is notably deficient.

One reason for wanting open borders may be pure self-interest. To put it bluntly, they simply don’t want to give up their servants.

Before the era of mass immigration, servants were largely the preserve of the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. The legal immigrants of the day were not interested in working at dead-end jobs for minimum wage. Why would they be when, within a few years after their arrival, they could own their own cars, homes, and even businesses, and join the middle class.

By the 1970s, servants had become expensive and rare. If you wanted something done around the home, you had to do it yourself.

But then millions of illegals began pouring across our southern border. Progressives soon discovered that they could now afford a staff that would be the envy of Downton Abbey’s Earl of Grantham.

Even those who were only moderately well-off found that they, too, could people their McMansions with gardeners, cooks, housekeepers, and nannies.

This is not to say that the new progressive “padrones” did not grow attached to the new arrivals over time. Why wouldn’t they, since the illegals work for practically nothing and say “Sí, Señora” to their every request?

But I’m convinced that it goes even deeper than that.

For the largely childless progressive elites, I think that their household help serve as surrogate children—sort of like pets, but much more useful. The help cooks their food, trims their hedges, and even cares for their only child, if they have one.

We know that people of pro-abortion sentiments average only one child, far lower than the American average, and only one-third of the three children that pro-lifers average.

In view of this, it’s perhaps not surprising that many progressives come to think of the help in the same way that normal families think of their own children. Very obedient children, to be sure. But children nonetheless.

Children whom you don’t have to nurture for nine months in your womb. Children whom you don’t have to suffer through puberty as they demand their own rooms, cellphones, and cars. Children who don’t grow up to insist on attending Ivy League universities at $70,000 a year or more.

Children who never grow up at all, at least not in the way normal children do.

On some emotional level, these illegals become surrogate children, replacing the ones that self-satisfied and self-centered progressives refused to have, or perhaps aborted.

No one wants children to die on the U.S. border, as two did recently. But the wailing and gnashing of teeth over these tragedies by the Left seems somehow overwrought.

After all, these are the same folks who seem to have no trouble ignoring the loss of a million unborn Americans a year. Or, for that matter, in justifying abortion up to the point of childbirth. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo currently is pushing the passage of a law that would allow abortion for all nine months of pregnancy.

For some progressives, the deaths at the border are just a handy club with which to beat the president. But I also wonder if pro-abortion feminists, in particular, are not crying for their own lost children in wielding it.

Do they want open borders for having closed themselves off to life?

Do they welcome any and all strangers from abroad in secret penance for having rejected the stranger in their wombs?

Have they transferred the affection they would have shown to their own aborted children onto illegal immigrants and their children? Is this why they are so determined to let illegal immigrants flood into our country?

As Trump would say, “That is a question for their psychiatrists.”

But it would explain a lot.

Photo Credit: Matthew Hatcher/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Get the news corporate media won't tell you.

Get caught up on today's must read stores!

By submitting your information, you agree to receive exclusive AG+ content, including special promotions, and agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms. By providing your phone number and checking the box to opt in, you are consenting to receive recurring SMS/MMS messages, including automated texts, to that number from my short code. Msg & data rates may apply. Reply HELP for help, STOP to end. SMS opt-in will not be sold, rented, or shared.