If you contemplated taking an outsider into your home, would you consider just economics?
The late Pope Benedict XVI mentioned this when critiquing Karl Marx, saying that the latter’s mistake was his viewing of man as a purely economic being; human behavior was explainable, and problems remediable, the thinking goes, solely via an economic approach (e.g., eliminating economic inequality will end human strife).
The point is this: Anytime we ourselves instinctively treat man as a purely economic being — as even that intelligent, conservative man I mentioned did — we are unwittingly repeating Marx’s mistake.
Yet this is common today even among conservatives. So do you see, now, how easily such errors can be mainstreamed and inform (read: deform) our thinking?
Now let’s return to immigration. Do the work skills and ethic newcomers bring with them define them? Are those qualities the most important things they bring to our shores? Since they’re not robots and won’t actually just be cogs in the economy, no. Rather, the most important things they bring are their beliefs.
To further illustrate the economic-being approach’s folly, let’s apply the standard not to (what should be) our national family, but our actual one. If you contemplated taking an outsider into your home, would you consider just economics? Would it only matter that he was going to contribute another $800 monthly to the family budget? Or would you first consider what beliefs and behaviors he’d bring into your home — how he, for instance, would influence your kids?