In his speech to Congress the other night, Joe Biden made the claim that “immigration has always been essential to America.” That’s such a routine liberal talking point that most simply gloss over it as though it were either empty blather or else holy writ. But is it true?
No, says Neil Munro of Breitbart News in an April 28 column:
The United States won World War II, created a middle-class economy, invented many new technologies, revived racial equality, and landed astronauts on the moon during the long period of low migration between 1925 and 1970.
Immigration into the United States had gone full tilt from the 1840s on, but by 1924 the American public, weary of massive immigration, forced Congress to take action. Laws passed in that year drastically reduced the numbers of immigrants for the next several decades.
By 1934, the number of new immigrants had dropped by more than 90 percent–to just 29,000–from the 1921 peak of 800,000. The relative lull lasted for another three to four decades, until new laws in the 1960s began the re-opening of the floodgates that began to be seen in the early seventies. Yet during that low-migration period, U.S. inventions and productivity continued to boom.
According to PBS, U.S. investors and companies rolled out the television in 1927, frozen food in 1929, radio astronomy in 1931, the defibrillator in 1932, ski lifts in 1937, nylon in 1938, the first digital computer in 1939, the atomic bomb in 1945, suburbia in 1947, the electric guitar in 1948, the first commercial computer in 1951, the polio vaccine in 1957, the compute chip in 1959, the laser in 1960, the idea for the Internet and the actual moon landing in 1969, the fiber-optic cable in 1970, the video game in 1972, and much more.
In addition, real income during the low-immigrant period rose greatly, doubling between 1950 and 1970. With the return of high levels of immigration, however, the rise in family income occurred far more slowly, rising only one-quarter from 1980 to 2020.
Immigration undoubtedly helps create a larger economy, with whatever benefits that provides, but is it essential to progress and prosperity? Hardly. History tells us otherwise.
For more, see Breitbart News.