The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“Newspapers have been reporting on the demographic challenges in Asian nations like China, Japan and South Korea. Some expect China’s population, for example, to be cut in half by 2100.
“If current trends continue, some of the same problems will sooner or later hit the United States, and they won’t be fixed with family-style entitlement policies that cost huge amounts of money and distort the economy without increasing fertility.
“A far better priority would be immigration reform that lets more people in alongside regulatory reforms to boost housing, energy and food production. . . .
“A shrinking workforce is a big deal. Having fewer workers means that working hours per capita will be longer — including longer hours for older, manual-labor workers. It will also spur a further decline in productivity.
“Eventually wages and innovation will decline — a decline that will be even steeper if the government and labor unions continue to resist productivity-enhancing automation and free trade. . . .
“Innovation will also be lessened if government officials continue to punish the necessary investments with higher taxes on capital and more stringent regulations that mean fewer factories, machines or housing. . . .
“For one thing, while market-friendly policies will not artificially tamp down population, they alone may not increase population and, hence, the size of the future workforce.
“Failing to increase America’s working-age population will make it challenging to sustain programs like Social Security. Shortly after the program was created in 1935, there were 42 workers per retiree. Today this ratio is 3-to-1 and heading toward 2-to-1. . . .
“Birth rates have been dropping since the end of the postwar baby boom in the late 1950s. While we Americans still have enough children to replace ourselves, we don’t have enough to grow the population.
“We leave this growth to immigrants, who tend to have more kids than do native-born Americans. . . . Maybe most importantly, more people mean more brains. That translates into more innovation followed by more growth. . . .”– To Remain Viable U.S. Needs more Immigrants, Veronique de Rugy, Newsmax, 2/23/23 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: The author is factually wrong in a number of her statements. Immigration, under current statutes, will not do much to lower the average age of the U.S.—even if it were substantially increased. Among the reasons, the average age of immigrants has risen in recent years while their birth rate has fallen to a level not much higher than the native rate. In short, immigration will not save Social Security.
She’s also wrong to claim that without more immigration “wages and innovation will decline.” In fact, it’s the exact opposite. By the economic law of supply and demand, wages increase when the supply of workers decreases. Higher wages, in turn, create incentive for companies to substitute machines for human labor—a move which typically results in higher productivity. Already, the automation of jobs is moving swiftly forward, a trend which negates the dire predictions of “labor shortages.” If we can’t find people to do jobs, we can invent machines to do them.
The author ignores the liabilities of mass immigration which will make us anything but “viable.” Divisive diversity is one of them. Increasing diversity correlates with declining civic ties and social cohesion. The country is divided today and becoming more so. Many immigrants are not inclined to assimilate because our elites inform them that assimilation is “racist.” The author, with her concern about economic prosperity, might reflect that immigrants come from cultures that are not sympathetic to limited government and free enterprise. It is no coincidence that California, the state with the highest number and percentage of immigrants, is generally rated as one of the worst states in the country to do business.
The author informs us that immigration will be helpful it will bring “more brains,” Yet she neglects to note that it also will bring us more people who aren’t so bright. Current immigration policy does not place first priority on admitting talented people. First priority goes to people with family connections to previous immigrants.
Immigration enthusiasts try to persuade us that mass immigration is the panacea that will solve all our problems. Unfortunately, they will never consider the problems it will create.