All teary

I read this article at my desk today and, by the end, I was all teared up over it.  It made me think of how wonderful it is to live in a tight-knit community, with everyone taking an interest and responsibility for the wellbeing of everyone else.  It's nice.  It also made me think how terrifying it would be to suddenly have to move after years of living somewhere that maybe you thought you'd never leave.  And of course I thought of immigration policies.  Especially policies that divide families up arbitrarily and force them into dramatically less than ideal situations.  Of course the couple in this article had somewhere to return to and family to fall back on if things didn't work out.  But too many people don't have those safety nets.  Why can't immigration policies work in favor of families rather than against them?  What kind of a shift in philosophy and perspective needs to happen for our policies to serve people rather than some statistical calculation?