Go full Abbott.

This was started by a comment from Jenny that links to a site which has a bunch of really sad faces and points out that if we are hospitable we will be a witness. And I was instantly repelled by it. It looked too photoshopped, it was rhetoric.

I understand the need to be charitable, even when we are putting ourselves at risk. To show hospitality to those who have hurt you. But we have some other responsibilities, and one of them is to our nation. For our nation, as Peter Hitchens said, is not our own.

Actually we can’t do what we like with this country. We inherited it from our parents and grandparents and we have a duty to hand it on to our children and grandchildren, preferably improved and certainly undamaged.

It is one of the heaviest responsibilities we will ever have. We cannot just give it away to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves.

Every one of the posturing notables simpering ‘refugees welcome’ should be asked if he or she will take a refugee family into his or her home for an indefinite period, and pay for their food, medical treatment and education.

If so, they mean it. If not, they are merely demanding that others pay and make room so that they can experience a self-righteous glow. No doubt the same people are also sentimental enthusiasts for the ‘living wage’, and ‘social housing’, when in fact open borders are steadily pushing wages down and housing costs up.

As William Blake rightly said: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.’

Now, I have argued that the most merciful thing is to stop economic refugees. And there are simple rules in dealing with this. They were invented by the Australians (under a previous government Helen Clarke signed a lot of rights of Kiwis away) and refined by Abbott. I call this going full Abbott, and it relies on a few things.

One is a secure border: a moat helps, or a fence, or a mountain range, But given that the rules are simple.

1. No benefits for any immigrants until they have citizenship
2. Instant deportation post imprisonment for any immigrants until they have citizenship. No exceptions. Families do get split.
3. No illegal immigrant is allowed to enter, or remain within the nation. You turn boats away, destroy the tunnels, and deport overstayers
4. You allow refugees to enter legally, per international commitments

I should add that every nation has a right, even a duty, to discriminate and take those refugees that will fit in: who can work, who are of compatible cultures, and who meet their security standards. This is a fundamental duty of all nations: to secure and defend the borders.

And you don’t let emotive photos change that.

The Syrian refugee crisis is a voluntary crisis. It would go away in a snap with secure borders and rapid deportations. The fake Syrians would stay home if they knew that their fake passport wouldn’t earn them a train ride to Germany’s Hartz welfare state, but a memorable trip to the Syrian Civil War.

Even announcing such a policy would lead to a rapid wave of self-deportations by finicky refugees for whom Bulgarian jobs, Italian food and Swedish weather aren’t good enough.

Plenty of Syrian refugees returned on their own from the Zaatari camp in Jordan when they saw that there weren’t enough treats for them. They went back to Syria from Turkey and even Europe when they didn’t find life to their liking. If they were really facing death back home, they would have stayed. There were no Jews going back to Germany during the Holocaust because they couldn’t find jobs in New York. Nobody goes home to a genocide. They go home because they were economic migrants, not refugees.

The crisis here is caused by the magnet of Western welfare states. Get rid of the magnet and you get rid of the crisis. Stop letting migrants who show up stay and there will be no more photogenic rafts filled with “starving” and “desperate” people who pay thousands of dollars to get to Europe and then complain about the food and the weather. Put up border fences and the “hikers” will go back home.

Keeping the doors open intensifies the crisis. It’s the sympathy of the bleeding hearts that leads to dead children whose parents are willing to risk their lives for their own economic goals. The left creates the crisis and then indicts everyone else for refusing to accept its solution that would make it even worse.

The “humanitarian catastrophe” in which the migrants use their children as photogenic human shields would go away if the doors were closed to everyone except real refugees who were not part of this war. The only thing that taking in fake refugees does is attract more of them and that empowers the left which uses dead children for its power and profit at more places than just Planned Parenthood.

Slovakia has announced that it will only take in Christian refugees and that’s the right thing to do. Christians are the real victims of this Muslim conflict. The vast majority of the refugees, many of whom aren’t even Syrians, aren’t. The rest of Europe should use Slovakia’s refugee policy as a model.

Slovakia has that right. I need not mention the errors the EU is making.

Perhaps the EU needs workers. But let them come in to work. Let them earn their citizenship: by being legal resident and taxpayer for a period; perhaps by serving with honor in the military, or perhaps by another form of service. Each state is sovereign and can choose such things: it is one of those things that rulers to their people need to give account.

Perhaps these people are refugees. But perhaps they are not: they are of the same demographic as an invading army: young, single and male.

And, finally, when you emigrate you normally are grateful to be accepted. Here NZ’s PM has a weakness. His mother was a Jew, an Austrian, and a refugee, who married and English immigrant to NZ… was widowed, and raised her children. John Key identifies with refugees. His heart grieves for them.

He has not gone full Abbott: we have increased our refugee intake. But so has Australia.

What we cannot do is let twitter set, for the sense that we are producing a cute hashtag or goodthink, a system that supports the corruption of people smuggling, that destabilizes the few functional states in the world. and causes people to hope that if they can just cross this sea it may succeed.

For smugglers will never have a qualm about using the dead bodies of women and children as a weapon. Give them not the opportunity.