Chris Abraham

Global development activates global desire. Once modern life becomes visible, it becomes the reference point. A world that modernizes becomes a world that wants AC in every room, cars in every driveway, flights for holidays, larger homes, constant power, phones, televisions, refrigerators, mobility, comfort, choice.

This isn’t excess. It’s the baseline of modern life being adopted everywhere at once.

That activation of desire is the unintended consequence nobody wants to confront.

People don’t escape poverty to remain austere. They escape it to live fully inside the modern world they’ve been shown. Development doesn’t pause at survival or dignity. It accelerates into expectation.

And once expectation exists at planetary scale, it does not slow down because of warnings, guilt, or behavioral scolding.

This is why climate collapse is structurally inevitable once development succeeds globally. The problem is not that people don’t care.

The problem is that caring is irrelevant once billions of people want the same comforts, mobility, and consumption patterns. Global desire floors the accelerator whether anyone likes it or not.

Climate change is not the result of individual failure or moral weakness.

It is the downstream effect of a world that successfully taught itself what “normal” looks like and then tried to pretend that normal could be optional. The system isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do.

Such hyperbolic bullshit. When people hear “concentration camp,” they don’t picture “a processing center.” They picture kill camps, work camps, starvation camps. They picture people getting beaten, shot, tortured, disappearing. That’s the mental movie you’re cueing up, and it’s irresponsible.

And if your definition is just “the government holds people behind fences,” then hold my beer: America already runs the biggest detention system on the planet. We’ve got nearly 2 million people locked up, and we lead the world on incarceration even compared to the places everyone loves to call evil. 

But here’s the point: prisons and jails are punishment after conviction. Immigration detention is transit detention: holding/staging facilities for people who are not legally entitled to live and work here while they’re processed and, if they don’t qualify, removed. That can still be harsh, degrading, abusive, and it absolutely needs oversight.

Just stop pretending it’s automatically Dachau because you want the headline to hit harder. Words matter. If you mean detention pending deportation, say that. If you mean forced labor or extermination, say that. Don’t use one loaded term that smuggles in the worst historical meaning and then act surprised when people hear exactly that.

Deportation in the United States can be modeled as a large-scale game of hide-and-seek shaped less by statute than by executive enforcement.

During periods of low barriers and low oversight—most visibly between 2020 and 2024—the system broadcast clear signals: enforcement was deprioritized, backlogs expanded, and risk appeared low. Migrants responded rationally. Advocacy networks and NGOs amplified the signal. Over time, many actors treated the quiet as permanence.

That was the mistake.

“Olly olly oxen free” was never called. It was inferred.

Executive orders are not law. They are contingent, reversible, and dependent on who holds office. This is why immigration policy is uniquely unstable: one administration builds a Jenga tower of tolerance through memos, guidance, and restraint; the next removes those blocks. DACA can be narrowed or revoked. Priorities can flip overnight. This is not betrayal—it is how executive power functions.

Claims that 20–40 million migrants entered during that period, or that 60 million undocumented residents now exist, may be inflated. But accuracy is secondary to perception. Belief drives behavior. Many people bet their lives on the assumption that “olly olly oxen free” had effectively been declared—and that future administrations would honor it.

That bet was never guaranteed.

When enforcement resumes, the correct description is not moral ambush but risk reactivation. A lapse is not an amendment. A backlog is not legal status. Time elapsed is not ratification. The rules did not disappear because they weren’t enforced.

The moral debate can continue. But descriptively, this outcome is what happens whenever actors mistake tolerance for permanence. If stability is the goal, it requires durable law—not inference, not vibes, and not pretending the seeker put the blindfold on forever.

The deportation debate keeps circling whether Trump promised to remove only “criminals.” That question misses the deeper disagreement. The real divide isn’t compassion versus cruelty—it’s whether unlawful presence itself carries moral weight.

The right generally treats being in the country illegally as the crime. Not because undocumented people are immoral, but because unlawful presence is a condition that doesn’t disappear through good behavior. In that sense, it resembles original sin: not a judgment of character, but a state you exist within. You can be lawful, loving, productive, and kind, and still bear the mark of original sin—being here illegally.

The left rejects that framework entirely. “There are no illegal people,” especially on stolen land. Illegality is viewed as a technicality that dissolves under human need and historical injustice. If there’s a biblical parallel, it isn’t original sin—it’s eating the fruit of knowledge.

Yes, it violates a rule. Yes, it leads to exile. But it also produces agency, self-awareness, and moral autonomy. The fall is painful, but enlightenment is worth the cost.

That’s why the two sides talk past each other. One side sees exile from Eden as the unavoidable consequence of defying a boundary. The other sees exile as proof the boundary itself was unjust, because Eden sat on stolen land.

This framing doesn’t deny the humanity of undocumented immigrants or the suffering caused by enforcement. Catholic theology never pretends exile is painless. It simply insists that compassion doesn’t erase original sin—it responds to it.

Until we admit we’re arguing over which story governs reality—obedience or awakening, order or agency—we’ll keep mistaking theology for policy and policy for cruelty.