Daily Inspiration Quote by Marvin Olasky

The power move here is refusal: an educator, someone presumed to traffic in answers, choosing instead to sit in public uncertainty. "I don't know the right number" is almost aggressively modest, a sentence that tries to lower the temperature in a debate designed to run hot. It sidesteps the usual theatrics of immigration talk - the clean, overconfident number that signals toughness or compassion - and admits the question is harder than the slogans.

But the subtext isn’t neutral. "The right number" quietly concedes the frame that immigration should be managed like a dial, that there exists a single optimal figure waiting to be discovered. It turns a sprawling moral and economic argument into a technocratic puzzle, while also implying that most people claiming certainty are either bluffing or selling something. In today’s culture war economy, ignorance can be a kind of credibility.

Context matters: coming from an American conservative intellectual associated with debates over welfare, charity, and social policy, the line reads like a hedge against ideological traps. It signals caution to restrictionists without endorsing their maximalism, and it nods to human complexity without fully stepping into the moral claim that people are more than inputs to a labor market.

The intent, then, is not to end the argument but to reframe who gets to speak with authority. It’s an invitation to humility - and a reminder that in politics, even humility can be strategic.