The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
But the fact is, the country needs more immigrants of every kind. It needs innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers and other skilled workers for its economy to thrive. It needs crop-pickers and health-care workers to do jobs native-born Americans generally don’t want. It also needs to resolve the status of more than 10 million undocumented residents. And as the world’s most powerful democracy, whose strength and legitimacy depend on living up to its values, it has compelling reasons to fix its broken systems for aiding asylum seekers and refugees. . . .
In all likelihood, the importance of immigrants will grow in the digital age. There’s good evidence that high-skilled immigration promotes innovation. Immigrants are almost twice as likely as the native-born to start new businesses. . . .
Demographics, meanwhile, are making America’s needs more acute. A country with fewer babies and more old people has greater need of immigrants. Last year, the U.S. population grew at its slowest pace since 1937. . . .
Other things equal, this means slower economic growth, and an aging workforce pushes the same way. Fewer workers supporting more retirees will put Social Security and other public pension plans under further strain.
The quickest, smartest and most compassionate way to shrink the undocumented population further would be to legalize the million-plus people in the U.S. already under some form of temporary protection. – America’s Immigration Crisis Goes Beyond the Border, James Gibney, Bloomberg.com, 7/12/19 [Link]
Fact Check of Quote Above: America is a fully-developed modern country of 327 million people. Does it make any sense to claim that we should have a policy of mass immigration that we had in the 19th century when we were trying to populate a land of empty and wide-open spaces? For the past thirty years we’ve had the highest sustained level of legal immigration in our history—around a million a year—and it shows no sigh of abating.
Also we might ask why our current population, according to immigration advocates, isn’t adequate to provide needed workers and economic prosperity. Between 1924 and 1965, when our population was substantially less than now, we greatly limited immigration. During that period we created a vibrant economy, one that sustained a strong and growing middle class, and we led the world in technological development. Today, after more than fifty years of mass immigration, we have a shrinking middle-class and we no longer dominate innovation.
Immigration enthusiasts claim we have a desperate shortage of people in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, but this is simply propaganda put forward by businesses seeking cheap foreign labor through the H-1B program and other types of visas. A key point to consider is that according to the Census Bureau, about three-quarters of U.S. college graduates with STEM degrees to not have jobs in STEM fields.
The assertion that immigrants have extraordinary entrepreneurial ability is not true. The Current Population Survey reveals that immigrants and native-born Americans are self-employed at about the same rate. The claim that we as an ageing society face a labor shortage is belied by the fact that the U.S. economy is on the cusp of a major transition to automation. Studies predict that a large percentage of the jobs now done by humans will be automated within the next ten years or so, perhaps as many as 40 percent. In this situation finding work for Americans, rather than a labor shortage, will be our leading concern. Another point to bear in mind is that immigration, under our current laws, will not significantly lower the median age of Americans or significantly increase the percentage of working-age people.
The author of the article above cites our “values” as a reason to give amnesty to all the illegal aliens living in the U.S. One of those values he doesn’t seem to consider is our rule of law. If we reward people who break our laws we show little respect for that rule—and we encourage more lawbreakers to come by encouraging them to hope that they too can reap a reward.
Immigration enthusiasts are always talking about “compassion,” but seldom does this benevolence extend to the tired huddled masses of American citizens who yearn to breathe fee of mass immigration and all that it brings—divisive diversity, wage suppression, crowding, resource depletion, and environmental stress.