Nonprofits as Migrant Pull Factors

Do homeless shelters and food banks anywhere in America cause or contribute to illegal migration? Demographers refer to things that generate migration as either “push” or “pull” factors.  Push factors are situations at the origin — poverty, crime, political repression, natural disasters — that cause people to leave.  Pull factors are situations at the destination — jobs, security, political and religious freedoms and the like — that attract people to destination countries.  The premise of the lazy-eyed Cowboy’s unconstitutional persecutions of migrant nonprofits are that those nonprofits constitute pull factors bringing more and more migrants to the United States.  And without which migration would evaporate or significantly decrease. But that ignores the exponentially greater force of push factors.  It equates the push and the pull. It would be like asserting the Pilgrims left England, risking life and limb on the high seas, in hopes that Indians were waiting to celebrate the first Thanksgiving.

The crime, poverty and various insecurities in origin countries is like a raging fire in a high rise building.  Poor migrants — involuntary migrants —  are like people trapped on the 10th floor.  Eventually they have to jump no matter what awaits them.  Jump or certainly die.  If a migrant nonprofit is a pull factor, it’s merely a group of neighbors with an outstretched sheet on the sidewalk below.  Not very enticing unless and until the fire in the high rise begins to burn feet and choke off oxygen.  People trapped on the top floor of a burning building are going to jump if the flames get hot enough whether there is a group of neighbors with a sheet or not.

Migrant nonprofits are only neighbors down below with a sheet.  The thought occurred to me as I read an interesting article in the Times last week.   The worrisome thing about the article, As Public Support for Migrants Fades, Private Donors Confront the Crisis, is that even progressives might be thinking about nonprofits as the cause of, rather than a solution to the influx of migrants.  Here is one of the reader comments:

You do not have to be a xenophobic MAGA racist to believe that the United States should have control of its borders, or that the overwhelming majority of immigrants entering the country in the past ten years are doing so dishonestly, or that welcoming, supporting and allowing them to cut the line is grossly unfair to those who follow the rules and immigrate legally, or that we should be addressing the needs of our own citizens before those of the migrants. I say that as a Democrat, a liberal and a child of legal immigrants.

I can’t disagree but its not the pull of homeless shelters and food banks causing or worsening the problem. Nonprofits can’t ignore the problem in hopes it will go away.  Or that they will not come.  They work in relief of government burdens, not exacerbation:

More than two years after the first buses of migrants began arriving from the southern border, New York is running short on time, money and public sympathy to support the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have settled here.  The city is facing a budget crunch and a once-in-a-generation affordability problem and cannot indefinitely provide asylum seekers with shelter, housing and other services. At the same time, migrants desperate to work have struggled to find jobs.

Enter one of New York’s pillars of power: big money.  After largely staying on the sidelines of the migrant crisis, a group of influential philanthropies is planning to spend millions of dollars this fall on efforts to make asylum seekers more self-sufficient and eventually able to contribute to their new home.

On Thursday, the Carnegie Corporation of New York plans to announce a $4 million donation to the city’s public libraries, in part to expand English language classes popular with migrants.  Two other philanthropies — the Robin Hood Foundation and the New York Community Trust — will together spend at least $4 million on a separate effort to bolster nonprofits that have been on the front lines of the crisis, connecting migrants stepping off buses at Port Authority with shelter, food, schools, legal assistance and job training.

While the funding signals a new phase in philanthropy’s interest in migrants, the migrant crisis remains a profound challenge for the city. Public polling shows that the vast majority of New Yorkers are worried about accommodating migrants into a city already saddled with problems. Some donors still consider the migrant issue fundamentally unsolvable and have avoided weighing in.

Any act of charity qualifies as a pull factor, by the way.  Charity literally, figuratively, and invariably attracts us to a better place.  It is supposed to be a pull factor.  But its not enough to make us leave home if things aren’t intolerable.  It’s silly to think that humanitarian nonprofits can even constitute a pull factor sufficient to beckon people who don’t want to jump but have no other option.  

darryll k. jones