The Quote Below—More Misinformation form the Media
“[John Stossel]: Millions flee Ukraine. Where will they go?
“Some want to come to America. But doing that legally is hard. A complex system is supposed to determine which people deserve to get in line to get in.
‘The line is broken,’ explains Reason magazine editor at large Matt Welch in my new video.
“For example, America has a nursing shortage, but immigration authorities turn away foreign nurses. . . .
“This month, President Joe Biden announced the United States would take in 100,000 refugees from Ukraine.
‘He could snap his fingers and make it 250,000 if he chose,’ says Welch, and he should, because ‘we’re a refugee country, and the people who come here tend to be the best.’
‘But they could be the worst,’ I point out.
“Even the supposed ‘worst of the worst,’ Welch replies, made America better. That’s a reference to 1980, when Fidel Castro let 100,000 people out of jail and encouraged them to go to America. . . .Castro assumed they’d cause problems in America.
“But ‘that was wrong,’ says Welch. Despite their past problems, ‘they enriched Miami. They added to the economy and didn’t detract from the people who lived there.” A study showed that the Cuban exodus raised wages of low-skilled Miamians. , , ,
Today, conservatives are more likely to argue against letting in refugees, saying, as Ann Coulter put it, “Things can turn overnight when you’re bringing in these masses of people from very, very different cultures.” Then she joked, ‘And make it a hate crime to ask them to assimilate. . . .
“’More reasonably, many Americans fear that crime will rise if we let in more immigrants. But that’s unlikely.’
“They commit far less crime than native-born Americans,” Welch points out. He’s right. . . .
“’What if they just feed off welfare?” I ask.
“’Then they would be the exception,” he responds. Immigrants, overall, collect less welfare than native-born Americans. . . .
Soon more refugees will come to America. Welch argues that we should let more in. ‘America is an assimilation machine,’ he says. ‘It’s something that we should do more of because we’re really good at it!. . . ‘.—We Should Take in More Ukrainian Refugees, John Stossel, WND, 3/29.22 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: Stossel and Welsh are libertarians who believe, as a matter of dogma, that mass immigration is always enriching, with no possible downsides. Without a doubt it is enriching for people who are already rich, but generally not for the rest of us. Take, for example, Welch’s statement about nurses. A shortage of nurses largely exists because U.S. nurses are underpaid and overworked. But this problem, if left alone, could be self-correcting. Specifically, to attract an adequate nursing staff, medical institutions would have to raise nurses’ wages and improve working conditions. But with a flood of foreign nurses available, they would have no incentives to change and reform the system.
Walsh claims that mass immigration to Miami as been an unqualified success story. That is highly debatable. As a case in point, it is not clear that immigration did no harm to low-income people in Miami. Much evidence suggests otherwise. As for immigration enriching Miami, that would be news to the large host of native-born Americans who have fled the city. Miami has a distinctly “Third World” ambience. Spanish there has largely overtaken English as the dominant language.
In Miami, it appears that America has assimilated more to Latin America than the reverse. Walsh claims that mass immigration is no problem because America is an “assimilation machine.” Apparently, he hasn’t noticed that this machine is breaking down. A big reason is the sad reality observed by Ann Coulter, which Walsh and Stossel casually dismiss. Many American elites don’t even want assimilation to happen. They regard it as a policy of “racism.”
Wash’s assertion that immigrants commit fewer crimes than natives is another debatable point. It certainly isn’t true of illegal aliens who break our laws to enter and stay here. As for his claim that immigrants use less welfare, that simply isn’t true. Immigrant households are significantly more likely to access welfare programs than native households.
An old saying states that “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” With libertarians one might say that you can lead them to reality, but as long as they drink their dogma, you can’t make them think.