Illegal Immigrants Return Home

Posted by Lorren on August 23, 2008

Perhaps there’s one good thing about having a sagging economy… illegal immigrants are returning home in record numbers, according to Fox News.com.

The economy probably isn’t the only component to this mass exodus from the United States. Arizona’s new law that revokes the business license of people that knowingly hire illegal immigrants probably has a little to do with it. There has been more enforcement as a whole as well.

The Fox News article points out that the exodus is hurting the families, and Mexico is finding it a challenge to reabsorb all these new people (perhaps it’s missing the money being sent back as well)? While I don’t think that anybody wants families to be torn apart, when we choose to disobey the law, we open ourselves up to the potential consequences of disobeying the laws as well. Countries that can not control (or even encourage) their citizen’s illegal emigration to other countries also might have consequences, such as having to reabsorb them when they return.

While it may have seemed pragmatic at the time for many to sneak through the desert in the middle of the night to try to find a job and a better life in America, having an ends-justifies-the-means mentality often has unintended (and perhaps unforseen) consequences. While you might be able to get away with doing wrong for a while, it often catches up with you. The US wasn’t doing anything about illegal immigration for a long while, so many people thought it was safe. But the law still existed, and when people in the US started to get fed up with the consequences of ignoring the problem for too long, it caught up with the people that thought it was safe.

Doing the wrong thing has consequences in the end… always. My mom had her identity stolen earlier this year, and they caught the person that was writing the bad checks. If you eat too much, you have to deal with the consequences of that (and I’m guilty of that). Having an abortion to get rid of an unwanted baby often produces guilt for years down the road. If you drop out of school, you probably won’t get as good of a job as you would have for continuing. Even if you make it out of this life unscathed, if you break God’s laws, you have to face him on judgement day.

As far as I know, the immigrant exodus has not reduced the number of kidnappings for ransom, or the Mexican Army crossing over onto our border and holding up our border patrol agents. That’s probably only going to get worse if the economy of Mexico is adversely affected by the return of their citizens.