We've all seen the news reports and read the articles about the tens of thousands of kids coming to the U.S.-Mexico border trying to get into this country.  Most of the kids are coming without their parents or other adults.  It has been called a true humanitarian crisis, and plainly it is.

We might imagine for a moment the desperation to a parent who turns his or her kids over to a smuggler to take them on a dangerous thousand-plus mile journey just for the chance that the kids will get into this country.  Consider how bad things must be in your home country for that choice to make sense.  Poverty, gang violence, drugs, lack of any opportunity, corruption-- the list certainly goes on.

So we can see why this is happening-- it is, after all, a perfectly rational choice under the circumstances.  We see the same thing going on at the borders of the EU.

Fundamentally this situation is caused by the fact that we have more than 90 percent of the world's wealth, and less than 10 percent of its population.  We are fabulously-wealthy, and getting richer and richer, in relative terms, every day.  The gap between the U.S./E.U. countries and the third-world is widening, and the pressure in the poorest countries to escape their situation and come here will only grow,

So, what do we see as this country's response?  

Sadly, it is the typical political posturing, along with a cry for bigger fences, more border patrol, quicker proceedings to send the kids back, stronger enforcement. It is like folks in the Middle Ages building bigger and bigger castles and deeper moats-- but we're using drones and motion-detection devices.

Just for a minute I wish we would consider a different response.  Why not welcome the kids in?

Sure, I know we don't want to have a bunch of drug-dealers and hardened criminals, but that's not what we're talking about.  We're talking about young kids escaping horrible poverty-- and worse. We can and should keep out crooks, even if they're just 16.

But why not let in the kids just send here by parents who are hoping that the kids might have a better life?

Too expensive?  Assume that we take in 50,000 kids, and spend $20,000 per year on each of them-- that's $1 billion. President Obama's emergency appropriation request for more judges, guards, facilities, staff, etc. to deport the kids is for $3.7 billion.

Even if we took in 100,000 kids, we'd still be way better off financially caring for them, educating them, integrating them into this country than spending money on the futile effort to send them all back home (so they can just try to come back again anyway).  

We might think about welcoming the "huddled masses," as the Statue of Liberty says.  

We are the greatest country in the world-- blessed with unimaginable wealth. We ought to act that way. Our finest days are not when we put up barriers-- remember the Jews who wanted to escape Europe and who we wouldn't take.

 Our finest days are when we've taken risks to help others, even when we didn't have to, even when we're helping folks who had made their own problems-- the Marshall Plan comes to mind.
Our finest days are when we build bridges, not walls.  Our finest days are when we have the confidence in American ability and creativity and resources to solve problems, not try to hide from them. Our finest days are when we truly act like the "city on a hill" that we are called to be.

I wish all the folks who are talking so stridently about quicker deportations for 14-year old victims of poverty and violence would stop acting like a bunch of "selfies"-- worried about their own image and their Twitter feeds-- and put their energy to work helping the kids who so-obviously need help.

I wish someone would at least start talking about that.