Jeb Bush has called illegal migration “an act of love.” And all over the West we see nations being loved to death, with endless human waves from Third World countries washing ashore. The results were predictable and are now plain: balkanization, riots, ethnic and racial strife and no-go areas in European lands. Yet we’re told that accepting what are “refugees” is a humanitarian imperative. Yet no one, it seems, points out an obvious fact, something that really is the crux of the matter.

If a stranger in need happens by your area and you’re a charitable sort, you may take him in for a time, feed him and provide other basic necessities.

You don’t generally make him an official part of your family and empower him to help decide on finances, what products to buy, how your kids will be educated and what values will prevail within your home.

The point? At issue in the current “refugee crisis” is not charity and the humane treatment of refugees. This isn’t only because most of the migrants in question may not even be refugees.

It’s because the issue is granting uninvited guests citizenship.

People talk about the financial burden of accommodating Third World migrants, largely because money (as opposed to national integrity) is all a demoralized and denationalized people think to discuss and because finances are a politically correct subject. But a national family can recover from devastated finances. It can’t recover from a destroyed national family.

I have pointed out again and again and again that the groups represented by virtually all illegal migrants and refugees — and 85 percent of legal immigrants since 1965 — vote for socialistic candidates between 70 to 90 percent of the time upon being naturalized. Related to this but also generally overlooked is that the people make the culture and government. Replace a Western people with Muslims or Mexicans and you no longer have Western civilization. You have Mexico Norte or Iran West.

Unfortunately, the granting of aid and the granting of citizenship have been so melded into one amorphous, superficially homogenous blob of bad policy that most people don’t even recognize they should be two distinct and separate issues — as they had been for most of history.

Of course, this serves the Left’s ends. The Refugee Crisis™ debate is framed as a battle between compassionate liberals responding to desperate pleas and coin-counting, callous, conservative reactionaries. But charitable motives animate the Left little, if at all. Liberals are notoriously tightfisted with (their own) charitable dollars; even more to the point, when a shipload of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution wanted safe haven in the US, leftist icon FDR turned it away. It’s one of those curious coincidences in history that the Left’s attitude toward refugees changed precisely when leftists discovered they could import voters who would empower them.

And does attaching something as a rider — citizenship — to charity aid the cause of charity? Are people more or less likely to offer charity to a person if the act begins and ends with charity, or if they must grant the individual some decision-making power in their home as well? That’s a package deal only a masochist could love.

So there’s an easy way to uncover liberals’ true motivations and whether they’re serious about charity for refugees. Make a simple offer: you’ll give bona fide refugees safe haven, and you’ll do your best to ensure they’re treated well. But there’s no citizenship. Ever. And they’ll be expected to eventually return to their homelands. See if the leftists bite…anything but your extended hand.

But liberals have already tipped their hand. Andrew Neather, a former adviser to ex-British prime minister Tony Blair, admitted in 2009 that one of the goals of the mass immigration authored by his Labour Party was “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” Barack Obama said in February he was “pretty optimistic” that because immigration was making the US “more of a hodgepodge of folks,” conservatism would be drowned out. Even more incredibly, there was this report, which tells us that “Obama’s amnesty plan is to use illegal aliens as ‘seedlings’…[who will] ‘navigate, not assimilate,’ as they ‘take over the host,’ create a ‘country within a country’ and start ‘pushing the citizens into the shadows,’” as I wrote in March. And a refugee scam is part of this: in order to get around immigration law and maximize Third World migration into the US, the Obama administration is categorizing as many people as possible as “refugees.”

This brings us to a contradiction here. On the one hand, liberals sometimes point out that despite doom-and-gloom prognostication, we live in the most “peaceful era in human history.” And they cite statistics backing up the assertion. On the other, they claim we must suddenly accommodate endless troves of “refugees” fleeing persecution. Question: if the world is unprecedentedly peaceful, why now do we have a supposedly worse refugee crisis than in more warlike times?

There’s another contradiction. We’re told that prosperous countries have a moral responsibility to the world’s poorer nations. So why then are wealthy Asian Tigers never asked to absorb any “refugees”? Japan, in fact, has virtually no immigration whatsoever despite having an extremely low birthrate and shrinking population. Moreover, since many refugees are Muslim, why aren’t Saudi Arabia, Qatar, The United Arab Emirates and the other oil-rich Arab nations taking them in? Wouldn’t it seem a natural fit? (Then they could stop importing the Filipinos and others they use for domestic help.) Maybe they know something we don’t.

In a sense, most of the world could be said to comprise would-be economic refugees. After all, how many people in Asia, Africa and Latin America wouldn’t want to emigrate to the West and enjoy the welfare state? And how many should, and can, the West absorb? One billion? Two billion? Three billion?

There undoubtedly are people in this world facing serious persecution. As to this, the West in general and the Obama administration in particular have done nothing to aid, for instance, the Christians being slaughtered in Muslim lands. But the bottom line is that the “refugees” are coming to the West simply because the West is nicer than where they come from. And they will keep coming until they’ve turned the West into where they’ve come from — unless we change course.

There’s much talk today about anchor babies, but that’s only part of our obsession with granting citizenship to foreigners. Workers should be expected to work and go home. Guests should be expected to visit and go home. For whether or not you believe charity begins at home, for certain is that conflating it with family status is robbing us of our home.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com