Immigrants

With all the recent trouble boiling around immigration, asylum seekers and so on, I've become keenly aware, once again, of a strange side-story. Given my previous 11 year marriage to an Indonesian woman, who herself lived more than a decade in America on a green card permit, I became acquainted with many Indonesian immigrants, most of whom have now become American citizens, and what I find most curious about these folks is that most of them have adopted views that are quite decidedly anti-immigration--as long as they apply to everyone except themselves, I guess.

Is that odd, or what? To me, it seems odd. Most of these people are women who grew up in poverty and then had the good fortune of meeting and marrying a wealthy American citizen. Now, they live in suburban mansions high above the sweat and toil of the native-born masses, and seem to look with careless disdain upon those who would also seek a better life in America, just as they themselves had once done. What can they be thinking? Do they fear that the entry of too many 'foreigners' will somehow threaten their own status or good fortune? Why, when they themselves have had to endure poverty and want, and sometimes fear for their lives, do they now harden their hearts against others? 

It seems that wealth and good fortune often foster arrogance and a lack of charity.