Rush Limbaugh and the Vatican Wall

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Well, there's big news to open the program with. CNN just reporting that il Papa, Pope Francis, upon boarding the pope jet on the return to Italy from Mexico said that Donald Trump is not a Christian. Man are they pulling out all the stops now. The Pope says that Donald Trump is not a Christian, because Christians do not build walls, they build bridges. Nevermind that the Vatican is surrounded by a wall and we won't even talk about who built that wall. But that's what the pope said. And given the pope's political leanings I'm surprised he isn't on the campaign trail for Bernie Sanders. But maybe Bernie Sanders is too far to the right for the pope.

Perhaps someone should tell Rush: 

1. The Vatican is the only 100% immigrant country in the world,
2. Anyone can enter the nation-state of the Vatican, any time of the day or night, without a passport,
3. The Vatican has not only accepted refugee families, it has directed every parish, monastery and shrine in Europe to also welcome refugee families. It has also accepted homeless refugees from Italy.
4. At 1.5 crimes per citizen, Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world, all directly attributable to its open borders. Many of the people who cross its borders every day are pickpockets who target all the other people who cross its borders each day, or shoplifters. It has no working prison. 
5. And, yes, we know who built the wall. The Popes did. In fact, part of the wall was built in order to prevent the Muslims from raiding the city, as they had in 846 AD. 

The Vatican has already taken in 2% of its population in Syrian refugee families alone, not counting the dozens of Italian homeless. To match population refugee percentage, the US would have to take in 6,581,298 refugees a year (2%). 

The population density of Vatican City is 1884 people per square kilometer.
The population density of the US is 35 people per square kilometer.
To match population density, the US would have to take in 18,527,256,000 refugees. That's over twice the entire world's current population.

Update:
Now that many people are beginning to understand how generous the Vatican is, I hear people making this complaint:

The Vatican is not welcoming millions of settlers, that's the difference. Those millions are tourists who go home, they don't overstay their visas and disappear into Vatican City.

Americans misunderstand. 

All the Pope is asking is that people be afforded food, shelter and dignity.
That's it.

If the US had a program wherein everyone who came across the border got fed,  bid a fond farewell, and were then put on a plane to a safe home somewhere else in the world, we would have done all that the Pope asks. We would have been a bridge for them to a new life. 

If our laws don't allow for that, or if our laws allow refugees to do something else, that's not the Pope's fault. That's on Congress and the President and us, the citizens who elected them.

It is really very simple.
We don't want to be the rich man in the story:

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. 20 At his gate was laid a beggar named Mexico, covered with sores 21 and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores...."


Or, as another commentator points out: 

To tear down those walls would be to destroy historically significant structures. Destruction like that, for symbolic purposes, is like what ISIS did when it razed Palmyra!

The preservation of historical structures — whatever they might symbolically mean — is dramatically different from the question whether to build something new.

"Pope Francis, tear down that wall!" might seem funny at first, but look again. You are unwittingly giving support to the terrorists who blow up temples and sledgehammer statues.

Update:
Today, 26 August 2018, the Vatican has taken over a hundred additional immigrants off Italy's hands.