Last year, we started a “happy hour” tradition with some friends in our neighborhood. We do this one Sunday evening each month, and we take turns hosting. Everyone brings a dish to share and we hang out from about 4-6 pm while kids play in the yard. It’s a “more the merrier” event, and we use it as an opportunity to get to know new people around the neighborhood.

After Christmas, one of my friends sent out a text because we hadn’t yet lined up our spring dates and houses. We usually plan out the next 3-4 months at a time and people volunteer to host. One of my friends said she could do February and another claimed March. No one volunteered for January, so I said we would be happy to take the first one.

The host for the month sends out a message to the group a week in advance reminding them when and where happy hour will be. Then people respond with what food they’ll bring. This is our loose organizational method and it always turns out great.

I share this with you so that you can copy our happy hour model (it’s truly been a great way to get to know more neighbors), but also to tell you how it went wrong this past month and what it taught me…

Micah and I love to host people at our house and, particularly, in our yard. When we moved back to Arizona (from California) four years ago, we were blessed to buy a property with a huge backyard that’s perfect for hosting all sorts of social gatherings, from weddings to birthdays to soccer team parties to Young Life Club for our local high school. We see our yard as a gift that we want to share with others.

We live with a “happy to host” mentality, always ready to offer our house to overnight guests or our yard for groups to gather. So when nobody signed up to host January’s happy hour, which was mere days away, I chimed in as I always do, “Happy to take January. I’ll make baked potato soup. Bring the fixings and dessert.”

When Friday of that weekend rolled around, I mentioned to my husband, “Oh, by the way, we are hosting happy hour this Sunday.”

Usually, this kind of announcement is not a big deal, but he looked at me wide-eyed. “We can’t do that. The sprinkler system is all torn up. We can’t have little kids running all over our yard.”

Before Christmas, Micah trenched up a huge section of our backyard to fix an irrigation leak, but he had to pause the project while we traveled for two weeks over the holidays. I had forgotten that the backyard was in disarray when I offered to host happy hour.

Wanting to be the always-ready hostess, I stared back at him. He continued:

“Our sprinkler system is wide open. Kids could break it or they could fall in the trenches and get hurt. We really cannot have people over right now. You have to cancel.”

I hate canceling on people, but I knew he was right. You don't need to have the perfect house or every project completed to invite people over, but this was truly a huge liability and safety situation in our yard. Sometimes, we have 8-10 families join us at happy hour, and many of them have toddlers. There is no way to control the chaos.

Feeling horrible about the last-minute change of plans, I jumped on a group text with some of my girlfriends and we agreed to move our happy hour to the neighborhood park. We still had a good turnout. We didn’t do dinner, but I brought freshly baked chocolate chip cookies to make up for my flakiness. Happy hour will carry on as scheduled next month.

As our country swirls with talk of immigration and deportations, my hostessing flop reminded me of something important: It’s okay to pause your hospitality to get your own house in order.

I wanted to stick with our happy hour plan — I even considered if we could still host and use our front yard instead of the back. But Micah reminded me that our best efforts would not keep four-year-olds from running out to our trampoline, since they’ve always had free rein of our yard during other gatherings.

Letting people come over with huge trenches around our yard was dangerous to them (a tripping hazard) and a liability to us (someone getting injured or the potential of further damaging the system we were trying to repair).

Similarly, the U.S. needs to cancel the happy hour. No immigrants for a while. None at all. It’s not because we are unkind or inhospitable or “unwelcoming to the foreigner” (as many progressives say as they twist Scripture). It’s because we have a safety and liability problem for all people involved. Just like we don’t want toddlers breaking their legs on our irrigation pipes, we don’t migrant children being trafficked or women being raped at our border. Just like we don’t want our new irrigation parts to get broken before they get reburied in the ground, we don’t want our citizens to be murdered or our economy to be exploited by non-citizens.

This is not the first time we’ve had to pause after a wave of mass immigration. From the 1920s until the 1980s, the U.S. slowed immigration after the surge of Europeans who came here at the turn of the 20th century. Our politicians saw that the mass of European immigrants was affecting the U.S. job market. Once we slowed European immigration, U.S. workers filled about 50% of blue-collar jobs and probably would have taken more if the U.S. had also closed immigration from Canada and Mexico. They didn’t expect so many workers to come across our northern and southern borders and continue the same problems caused by European migrants. That was short-sighted. If they had closed immigration entirely, many economic problems would have been stabilized long-term.

Am I anti-immigrant? Well, no. Just as I’m not anti-happy-hour.

We will gladly host happy hour again in the future when our irrigation system is repaired.

And I am sure the U.S. will welcome immigrants again (at a slower and controlled rate) after we have repaired the chaos and damage of the past few decades (and particularly the past four years).

When people complain about the problems with our immigration system — how long it takes to get a green card, why DACA students can’t gain citizenship — do they think importing more foreigners is going to help the process?

Why don’t we pause immigration and deal with our current situation? Deport all illegal aliens with violent criminal history first. Then deport illegal aliens more broadly. Give them a chance to voluntarily return to their native land and provide the plane to do so. Award citizenship to existing DACA students with zero criminal history who have completed a college degree or served in the military. Get rid of more illegal aliens. Move toward citizenship for people who have worked in the U.S. for 10+ years legally with a sponsor. Deport more illegal aliens. Make families decide whether they are going to separate or return to their native country together. Breaking the law often means tough consequences.

This will take years, truly. But as soon as we get honest about what we need to do and make the hard choice not to host a party right now, we can get to work and get the job done. Then we can consider if and how many immigrants we can allow, and we can selectively choose those who will make America a better place — people who value our founding principles and will gladly assimilate with our culture because it's a good one. So good, in fact, that millions want to be here.