People who live different lives, Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) notes, see different results from the same things:
Why are college professors generally for relaxed immigration laws and for government aid and cops, in general are against both?
It’s because we see different outcomes. The college professor sees the students who worked hard, took advantage of what was offered and used it to create good and productive lives. Sometimes against great odds and defeating incredibly negative circumstances. They see the good that the programs do.
The cops deal, every day, with the people who took advantage of what was offered to increase their ability to harm or to evade responsibility for their actions.
The programs that allow a young man from Mexico who illegally crossed the border to find a job, get health care for his children, become an asset to his community, pay taxes and have children who go to colleges and make America stronger are exactly the same programs that allow cartels of drug dealers to pack their organizations with relatives from the home country and rule through fear and traditions that were imported right along with them.
The programs that allow a struggling single mother to care for her children and keep them fed and get them to school and give them a chance at a life are the exact same programs that enables teen age boys to have contests on who can father the most illegitimate children before graduating from high school, and do so with absolutely no responsibility or penalties.
This is important. Sometimes the argument arises because the friend has a colleague who really made it in life with a little help paid for by the government… and you have either just delivered or just buried a baby addicted two two drugs and underweight with no functioning parent and that, the birth or the burial, were also paid for by the government.