Pragmatism must win over emotion

The 'we have to show our humanity by taking all these refugees' people don't seem to have thought through the practicalities.
It's all about the 'moral signal' that they want to give.

Most are comfortably off financially and believe that questions asking where we will get all the houses, hospitals, doctors, nurses, social-workers, teachers, jobs, etc to cope with an ever increasing population on our tiny over-crowded island, are somehow irrelevant or trivial or just an excuse for nastiness.

Whether this is moral naivety or wilful bad-faith and whether conscious or otherwise, who knows? But as long as I feel that I’m a ‘nice moral person', that’s all that seems to matter.
Sod the genuine practical social issues that large influxes of new people bring, or the poor already living here upon whom the extra costs and adverse consequences of rapid major societal change always falls hardest.

On this refugee issue, you either believe that we should prioritise helping the needy people of the UK, of whom there are plenty, or you believe in prioritising people from other parts of the world.
It’s pretty much as simple as that.

What we don’t have is the luxury of doing both, whether from a financial, skilled labour or geographical space viewpoint.
We will just end up doing both badly, which is indeed what we are doing.

You don’t have to give other people whatever they want to be a good decent person.
You don't need to take on guilt about things that you personally have had nothing to do with to be a good decent person.
You don’t have to take the problems of the world onto your own shoulders to be a good decent person.
Sort your own life, family and country out, then in your spare time, perhaps.....

One day we will realise that, for a host of reasons, life cannot be made totally fair for all people; which brings us back to the question, ‘do we focus on our own people in need, on our own poor, or those from other countries?’

It’s not a case of not caring, or not being a nice person.
It’s being practical & realistic about what is possible and about how much we can do, without destroying what we’ve already got; as opposed to being a self-righteous emotion-driven utopian idealist.

The thing with self-righteous utopian idealists is that it costs them very little to pontificate on social media or walk down a street waving a placard and shouting slogans, while potentially costing everyone else an awful lot if their ill-thought-through impractical emotional blackmail wins out.