I see a pattern in the online debates over Glenn Beck’s plan to bring a few thousand hot meals to children sent alone to to the US from Mexico. Anytime someone defends the practice, his critics get derailed in a massive non sequitur, beginning to argue about the gravity of the illegal immigration crisis, the economics of illegal immigration, and other related topics. The net effect is to say or to imply that the defender of Glenn Beck is simply wrong on illegal immigration.

The fact is, Glenn Beck’s actions are right or wrong independent of the correct policy on illegal immigration, and the entire debate is indicative of a moral decay that extreme leftists have injected into our rhetoric. We need to throw off their influence, now.

Let’s get this out of the way now. The President and his party have no regard for the people of Mexico. We saw that with the Fast and Furious scandal, and we see it now with their unguarded, reckless rhetoric that, as Beck himself has said, “engineered a humanitarian crisis in order to advance progressive policies on illegal immigration.” It’s amoral political posturing, degrading the rule of law and creating a horrible situation.

Further, the parents of these kids should be locked up. They’re putting their kids at risk of serious harm or even death, in order to game a political system. They are using their children for personal gain. It’s just a shame that, to borrow from Golda Meir, they don’t love their children more than they love the idea of moving to America.

But as much as we see these two forces at play, and understand what they are, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s happening. The crisis may be engineered, but the kids are real, and enduring this parental abandonment to be made into political pawns by American Democrats, and into a ticket to social bennies by their own parents.

These children are victims. They aren’t incentivized to do anything, they are powerless to make decisions here, and they are far from home with nobody to love them. That we would even debate whether we would show compassion for these kids, is a sign of how far down the road of Malthusian dehumanization that the pied pipers of the anti-immigration movement have led us.

I’ve long urged conservatives to ignore the group NumbersUSA. The group is good at tricking conservatives into adopting their propaganda, twisting our natural desire for rule of law into their Malthusian push for an extreme anti-immigration policy. The group’s founder, Roy Beck, is a long-time green left ‘journalist’ whose works, their website brags, are used by UN groups, including the pro-abortion and forced-sterilization UN Population Fund.

In their minds, it’s still 1970, and we’re still pretending that Malthusian doom is right around the corner, only they don’t seem to realize that Jonathan Swift was not serious when he proposed sacrificing children to achieve our policy aims.

Dehumanization is a core element of the NumbersUSA program. Illegal aliens to them aren’t people, they’re overpopulation. They’re numbers, hence the name of the group. So they stand up against “anchor babies,” “chain migration,” and other policies that refer not to illegal immigration, but to legal rights given to babies born in the United States of America, surely as native as I am born in Long Beach. Fundamentally, NumbersUSA wants you to stop thinking of immigrants as people like you or I.

It’s perfectly alright to be angry about illegal immigration. At my high school growing up, by far the largest club in my school was MEChA, a student group of the same racist, socialist agenda as La Raza. Hundreds of students would gather at my school to celebrate the prospect of reversing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with a passion for replacing the American government in the southwest with a racist regime of “Aztlan.”

It’s absolutely natural to get furious when reading stories like those in Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexifornia, of rootless migrant farmers who disrespect everything and everyone in this country, because they’re only staying until they get their money, and then go back home.

But the kids Glenn Beck is feeding aren’t criminals. They aren’t ideologues. They aren’t racists seeking the overthrow of the United States government. They’re victims of that kind of ideology, abandoned by their parents to The Cause.

What’s done is done. Barack Obama has made his choices. The parents of these kids made their choices. We can either join in the dehumanization of these children, like the progressives, like the Mexican radicals, and like the Earth Day greenie weenies at NumbersUSA. Or we can draw a line, and say “No, on our side of the border, there is human dignity.”

We’re not talking about giving them the vote, or in-state tuition, or a ‘path to citizenship.’ Though as effective refugees of a mass movement of parental abandonment in Mexico, they may have a case for those, under existing legal immigration law. This isn’t about Comprehensive Immigration Reform. This is about helping kids who are victims of a nasty political fight.

Mitt Romney in 2012 ran on a program of removing benefits to illegal immigration, enforcing laws already on the books, to create an environment removing the magnet of illegal immigration, and causing those already here to self-deport. But that’s not applicable to children.

What are we supposed to do? Drop them off at a bus stop in Mexicali or Tijuana? I don’t know, but tonight, we can give them a hamburger, a blanket, and a safe place to sleep. That’s not politics. That’s basic human dignity that conservatives have always stood up for against the alliance of green and progressive radicals.