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A famous story was told of a wash up of thousands of starfish. A young boy was throwing as many as he could back into the sea. A man told him he was wasting his time, "how will that help, there are thousands of them?" But the boy just picked up another starfish and threw it into the sea, saying: "helped that one".

Rejection of foreign aid is a gesture of helpless indifference that does little to help the sufferings in our present world, but the little that is done is like turning loaves and fishes into food for millions. Monroe was out of touch and unhelpful in saying, "you stay in your hemisphere and I'll stay in mine".

Had Monroe been around in the days of FD Roosevelt, he may well have been more worried about domestic issues. FDR intervened in the great depression to provide an economic uplift to millions of unemployed people. The cost in terms of US public debt is an ongoing legacy of the US economy. However, the US government recognized that without direct financial assistance, America was doomed to long term economic stagnation and other secondary crises. The intervention saved that generation, but the current generation was the long term beneficiary of the resultant prosperity.

The same post-depression generation then stood by with wrenched hands and folded arms pondering the darkness enveloping Europe, less than twenty years later. Already into an historic 3rd term of office, FDR pleaded with Americans to assist in the war effort, knowing that Nazism put the planet at risk. Lend-lease resolved congressional reservations and provided much needed capital support for the war effort, but he remained frustrated in his efforts to bring America to war, until Pearl harbor - the day that Churchill declared as the turning point in the war.

The reasons I bring these points up is because Americans are and have been beneficiaries of aid (even if it came from their own government) and secondly their reluctance to extend aid to a struggling world has historically reflected ignorance about how global affairs affect their own status quo.

My own country faces an immigration problem just as the US does. That immigration problem stems from economic problems across our respective borders and the promise of financial freedom in the land of plenty. Although our government has been rightly criticized for inadequately condemning the mismanagement of its neighbors, it rightly discerned that aggravation of the economic viability of those neighbors would put

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