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The United States enjoys great riches: wealth, resources and opportunity in large proportion to its population, as compared with many areas of the world. How are the people of Christ to view this? Are these divine blessings for our enjoyment alone, or might God be entrusting us with his riches to see how we invest them? And what implications might that have for our immigration policies?
In his book, Utopia for Realists, author Rutger Bregman refers to the U.S. as “the Land of Plenty” and argues:
“Billions of people are forced to sell their labor at a fraction of the price that they would get for it in the Land of Plenty, all because of borders. Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history. Inequality gaps between people living in the same country are nothing in comparison to those between separated global citizenries. Today, the richest 8% earn half of all the world’s income, and the richest 1% own more than half of all wealth. The poorest billion people account for just 1% of all consumption; the richest billion, 72%.
From an international perspective, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty aren’t merely rich, but filthy rich. A person living at the poverty line in the U.S. belongs to the richest 14% of the world population; someone earning a median wage belongs to the richest 4%. At the very top, the comparisons get even more skewed. In 2009, as the credit crunch was gathering momentum, the employee bonuses paid out by investment bank Goldman Sachs were equal to the combined earnings of the world’s 224 million poorest people. And just eight people–the richest people on Earth–own the same as the poorest half of the whole world. That’s right, a mere eight people are richer than 3.5 billion put together.
No wonder, then, that millions of people have come knocking on the gates of the Land of Plenty.”
By David Machemer
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