Guilt manipulation is a weapon of mass delusion expertly wielded by promoters of mass immigration. This weapon, propagated by their media allies, assaults Americans with variations of the following claim: "Our country is so wealthy that we have no moral right to keep out people from poorer countries. We owe it to them."

The assault often overwhelms good-natured Americans, particularly those who feel before they think. But if they did think, they might consider that we have no reason to feel guilty about the benefits proceeding from our historic national culture, characterized by the rule of law, self-control, liberty, and invention. We may feel sadness, but not guilt, toward the poverty abroad that often is the consequence of cultures quite different from ours.

And if people do think first-even the most generous ones-they cannot miss understanding the limits imposed by sheer reality. Namely, just how many of the hundreds of millions of impoverished people can we admit before they overwhelm us and make America a replica of what they fled? Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and no cause at all for guilt. We don't owe national suicide to anyone.

Still another shield against the guilt weapon is the truth that we're not really so rich as many seem to think. In fact, most of us aren't rich at all-and what we have is diminishing. On the surface, to be sure, America appears quite prosperous. But the appearances are deceiving because much of our life-style rests on mountains of public and private debt. Such "prosperity" can only last until the bills come due-as perhaps we're seeing now with the deflation of the housing credit bubble.

Genuine sustainable prosperity, as shown through history, stems not from credit, not from consumption, but from production. And our problem is that we are producing fewer and fewer of the goods that we consume. A long-term reason is the weakening of our historic culture, thanks in part to the cult of multiculturalism. A more immediate reason is the globalist dogma of free trade, which forces our producers to face unfair competition from abroad.

As a consequence, we are losing the manufacturing jobs that have long provided a middle-class standard of living for working Americans. Between 2000 and 2006, the U.S. lost 3.1 million manufacturing jobs. To be sure, the U.S. created many private sector jobs during that time, but as former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts points out, many of the new jobs are in "low paid domestic services."

Good jobs still remain in America, but quite a few companies are giving them to foreigners who enter on H1-B visas. Some law firms even help the companies circumvent laws which aim to give Americans first shot at this employment. The vice president of one such firm, Cohen and Grigsby, was even so brazen to state: "Our goal clearly is not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker." Meanwhile, foreign workers, legal and illegal, keep taking less desirable jobs, thereby driving down the wages of less skilled and educated Americans in those fields.

The bottom line is that the American Dream fading for many Americans, and the trend (along with mass immigration) began long before the turn of the century. "From 1980 to 2004," noted Mortimer Zuckerman, editor of U.S. News and World Report, "our gross domestic product rose by almost two thirds, but when you factor in inflation, the wages of the typical wage-earner actually fell. . . . 37 million Americans were living in poverty in 2004, but an additional 54 million were the "near poor. . . ."

At the same time, the wealthy class has grown much richer, often because of the cheap labor provided by mass immigration. This class and its media retainers are foremost among those pitching guilt to average Americans for not welcoming more immigrants. Yet they themselves feel no guilt as their growing bundles of cash weigh heavily on the backs of middle and working-class Americans.

And if these U.S. plutocrats care so much about poverty abroad, they seldom show it by offering to spread any of their cash there. One is open-borders billionaire George Soros. Far from helping poor countries, many analysts charge that his financial speculations destabilized economies in Asia and Latin America. And what about the wealthy in poor countries? The richest man in the world, with assets of $59 billion, is Carlos Slim, a citizen of Mexico. Mr. Slim and his fellow Mexican elites seem to have little interest in bettering the lot of their fellow citizens. That's a task they prefer leaving to American taxpayers.

Fellow citizens, ignore the guilt-wielding hypocrites when they tell us to save the world. The way things are going, we run-of-the-mill Americans are going to have a real struggle just to save ourselves.