TAKEN EACH IN TURN, groups that claim government largess often have compelling stories. Each article, isolated in its column-inches, each TV news segment, offset by commercials, evokes an initial urge to “just take care of the problem.” Really, what’s a few million dollars in the face of a half-billion-dollar state deficit?

Discussing health-care cuts for the children of illegal immigrants on the Jan. 20 edition of WPRI’s Newsmakers program, host Steve Aveson asked how Rhode Island could consider “solving the budget deficit . . . on the backs of kids who aren’t able to go out and earn a living.” Jennifer Lawless, a Brown University political-science professor and progressive congressional candidate, decried the harm to children of “our failure to have meaningful immigration policy and immigration reform.” It’s “not only health care,” she explained. “They’re also in this state always on the cutting block, whether it’s health care or education initiatives.”

The context of small savings relative to the immensity of the state’s financial problems swings both ways.

On one hand, the $4 million that Governor Carcieri expects to save in the young illegals’ RIte Care costs barely dents the deficit. On the other, it can’t accurately be said that we’re solving the budget crisis “on their backs.” It’s simply the case that, in the vast field of Rhode Island public spending, some small percentage of the disbursed burden of past profligacy falls on the RIte Care program.

Of course, the consideration of legality and immigration brings its own dynamic to this component of the governor’s plan. On the same talk show a month earlier, Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin noted one of Jesus’s “criteria for our judgment” as: “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” It follows, suggested the bishop, that “we have an obligation to do our best — to do as much as we can — to help [illegal immigrants] during difficult times.”

Although we should develop our public policies on grounds distinct from religious firmament, the intra-Catholic debate frames the discussion in a helpful way as our society decides the moral requirements for assisting foreign “strangers.” In all things, the church differentiates between the moral behavior of the governing authority and of the individual. The state can tax; it can imprison; it can even kill and conduct war.

When it comes to immigration, governments must, to some extent, be welcoming, and they must always act with at least the minimum compassion due people simply as human beings. But governments also have a responsibility to set and enforce policies that take into account a complex array of claims, foremost the well-being of citizens, who are their main responsibility.

Out of compassion, we meet the immediate needs of illegal immigrants —- food, say, or desperately needed medicine. Out of compassion, we ensure that their passage to wherever is safe. But Rhode Island has gone inadvisably far in making promises to care for them.

Indeed, as they began discussing our dire financial straits, members of the General Assembly cited doing so as a matter of self-identity. Senate President Joseph Montalbano led the way, professing in all forms of media (but here from the Dec. 30 Newsmakers, for consistency’s sake) that “a budget is really a policy statement, and I think that as Democrats, in the budget we’ve always tried to pay attention to . . . the needs of those less fortunate than we are. So in terms of that policy statement, it’s a good representative benchmark of what we stand for as Democrats in the Senate.”

Steve Aveson likened the decrease of public assistance for undocumented children to a “harsh carrot and stick”; “we deprive children of this support” so that their parents will “get the idea . . . and they’ll go away from Rhode Island.” But even a compassionate welcome can be worn out, and in truth, it only makes sense to devote scarce financial resources to their education and non-emergency health care if our invitation is for them to stay.

But the state’s primary moral obligation is to those who are not strangers, to provide an environment in which they can thrive of their own initiative. Thwarted by vested interests at the voting booth, many Rhode Islanders have been attempting, via moving van, to communicate to those Democrats in the Senate that the budgetary policy statement is unjust. It is on their backs, and at the cost of their aspirations, that Rhode Island’s powerful have been solving their deficit of maturity and failed comprehension of consequences.

What Mr. Aveson’s construct fails to address is that we, the faceless Rhode Islanders whose ostensible advocates in government and media have been wooed from their posts by fashionable ideology and corruption — we adults, fully deserving of the dignity and responsibilities due conscious actors — are finding it difficult, ourselves, to “go out and earn a living.”

Justin Katz, an occasional contributor, runs anchorrising.com, a public-policy-discussion think tank.