Immigration is a gift, not a right. Empathy is virtuous, too much can be suicidal.

Originally published in the Columbus Dispatch, this is a slightly expanded version that goes into more detail. I truly appreciate the Dispatch for their willingness to include contrarian voices and headlines that help to sell newspapers.

Empathy. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”

Along with other building blocks, empathy is key to a civil society. Most of us follow the law because we have an innate sense of discomfort, anger, or fear when others around us don’t. We know how it feels to be in the midst of lawlessness. We give to charity and support a basic social safety net because we either know from experience or can imagine how it feels to be hurting and in need of help.

And the lack of empathy is even one of the key traits of several anti-social personality disorders.

Former President Bill Clinton arguably won the presidency during a 1992 debate with then President George H.W. Bush when he famously said “I feel your pain” in response to a woman in the audience lamenting the burden of the national debt. It might have also been a rare moment of political honesty since Clinton was the last president to preside over a balanced federal budget.

But like most good things in life, too much of anything, including empathy, is often a bad thing, both individually and collectively.

Parents instinctively protect their children from harm, but those who shield kids from any emotional or physical pain deprive them of the very real growth that only comes from the struggle to overcome the hurt.

The same is true when our collective empathy to help those less fortunate excuses lawlessness or creates dependency and stifles the incentives and struggle necessary for them to achieve self-sufficiency and the ability to contribute back to the community that supported them.

Empathy also requires some level of trust. If we think our children are lying to us or a stranger falsely claims a need or disability to extract undeserved support, our empathy is not only diminished but often replaced with anger. Rightly so.

And that’s exactly where many of us find ourselves today, particularly as it relates to immigration.

Reports of as much as $9 billion of welfare fraud centered in Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community — the nation’s largest — reasonably raised concerns about similar problems in the nation’s second-largest such community in Central Ohio. Governor DeWine rightly noted that Ohio has different safeguards than Minnesota to limit the potential abuse here, but the problem isn’t just outright fraud, it’s the scale of the programs themselves.

A review of state and federal budget sources shows that roughly $45 billion of total social spending flows through Ohio. We’ve become so inured to seeing such numbers that we no longer recognize the scale of them. For most people, $1000 is a lot of money and $1 million is a life-changing fortune.

$45 billion is forty-five thousand armored cars, each carrying fifty thousand $20 bills.

Most of Ohio’s $45 billion in social spending is Medicaid, the majority of which is federally funded. But it’s all ultimately paid by taxpayers and $45 billion works out to an average of about $8000 for each federal tax return filed by Ohioans. That’s the annualized cost of a typical car payment, not including insurance.

While most of us surely know that no system of public support would be perfect, Governor DeWine’s spokesperson characterizing billions of dollars of fraud as “the cost of doing business” is an insult to the taxpayers footing the bill.

While official estimates of “waste, fraud, and abuse” in such programs is 3-7%, some estimates run as high as 20%. We Midwesterners are known to be generous people, but I doubt many know just how generous we already are, or that hundreds, if not thousands of hard-earned dollars from each of us are going to those whose only need is to abuse our good will.

Since these fraud allegations have gained widespread reporting at the same time the Trump administration started ramping up enforcement of federal immigration laws, it’s understandable for people to connect the two. That’s even more so when hyper-partisan pols like Minnesota’s Governor Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Frey continue to encourage protests against enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws. While they frame it as protecting their immigrant communities, it’s not unreasonable to question whether they’re also trying to distract from their failure to protect taxpayers.

Similar questions are just as appropriate for Ohio’s Governor DeWine and Columbus Mayor Ginther.

Though officials ostensibly encourage only peaceful protests, their persistent demonization of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and refusing local police support inevitably leads to protestors breaking the law, including direct interference with ICE agents. When such lawlessness leads to tragedies like the shooting death of Renee Good, the pols ignore their complicity for creating the conditions that led to her death and blame those enforcing the law instead.

Then on cue, the partisans on the political left play on our empathy for the orphaned children Ms. Good left behind and make her a martyr for the downtrodden. Some of us see instead an impressionable young mother in thrall to an ideology that uses people like her as political cannon fodder, her death being grist for the PR mill.

I share the empathy for Ms. Good’s children. I also have empathy for my fellow citizens and legal immigrants peacefully living their lives, following the law, and expecting elected officials to protect their interests.

Immigration is a gift of opportunity. It’s not a right. We exchange that opportunity for lawfulness and positive contributions to our economy and culture. No such gifts are due those who break the law, become dependent on taxpayer support, or demand our culture adapt to theirs rather than the other way around.

Canadian psychologist and author Gad Saad coined the term Suicidal Empathy to describe progressive notions that all cultures are equal and lawlessness is excusable for those who check the right boxes of oppression.

The immigrants we most admire were not spared hardship, they were forged by it. They struggled, worked, and contributed with gratitude for the blessing of liberty - not because it was easy, but because it’s a path to a better life.

Today, some demand in the name of empathy that we look past what earlier generations — of citizens and immigrants alike — refused to tolerate. Illegal immigration and welfare fraud must be intolerable. Empathy is no excuse. Restore standards, restore trust, follow the law, and our proud tradition as an immigrant nation may continue.

New Albany resident Philip Derrow is a retired business owner. He was a two-term member of the New Albany-Plain Local Board of Education. He is a regular Columbus Dispatch contributor. Reach him at philderrowdispatch@gmail.com.