Are you ready for more clogged roads, crowded hospitals and schools, urban sprawl, pollution, and resource strain? Because legal and illegal (im)migrants and their children are projected to add 75 million people to the United States by 2060, according to Census Bureau figures. This is the equivalent of adding the peoples of France and Belgium combined (without the great bread and chocolate) and would swell our population from the current 325 million to 404 million in just 41 years.
In fact, without “immigration, according to the Census analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies [CIS], the U.S. population would increase by just 3.7 million, the latest sign that the country is on a path to zero native population growth,” the Washington Examiner reports.
(Note: This seems questionable. Since America’s fertility rate long ago fell below replacement level, 2.1 children per woman, and now stands at 1.76, one would expect our population to drop under a zero-immigration scenario.)
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Regardless, immigrationists have used our low fertility rate to justify high-level immigration, claiming we need “workers.” But the CIS analysis illustrates this position’s folly, pointing out that “the age of the population won’t be significantly impacted, or lowered, from younger immigrants,” relates the Examiner.
In fact, “projections indicate that in 2060, 59 percent of the population will be of working-age (16-64), writes the CIS, “compared to a quite similar 58 percent” under a population-stabilization scenario.
Thus, immigration will perpetuate our population explosion “while only modestly impacting the ratio of workers to non-workers,” said Steven Camarota, the CIS’s director of research and lead author of the report.
A better alternative would be raising the retirement age, suggests the CIS. Increasing it by just “two years, even assuming zero net immigration, has about the same impact on the working-age share or ratio of workers to retirees in 2060 as the level of net immigration projected by the Census Bureau,” the report calculates.
Another way to tackle the working-age-population decline “is to increase the share of working-age people who are actually employed — referred to as the employment rate,” the CIS also tells us. “At present, the employment rate for those 16 to 64 is 70 percent, low by historic standards.”
(If this claim seems to belie the unemployment number, note that the latter has long been deceptive: It doesn’t include people who’ve given up and simply dropped out of the workforce.)
“Increasing the employment rate to 75 percent would have the same impact on the share of the population who are workers as would the immigration level projected by the Census Bureau,” the CIS continues.
This could easily be accomplished by incentivizing work and not laziness, by reducing handouts so that more profitable than “entitlement” is employment. Yet while getting more Americans employed would increase the number of workers, it wouldn’t accomplish the most significant, unspoken immigrationist goal: increasing the number of Democrat voters.
As I’ve often explained, most recently on Tuesday, 85 to 90 percent of our immigrants hail from the Third World, and 70 to 90 percent of them vote Democrat upon naturalization. To leftists, immigration isn’t about building an economy, but unassailable power.
The CIS does point out that it would be “possible to roughly maintain the working-age share of the population using immigration, but it would require net immigration of 232.1 million by 2060 — five times the level projected by the Census Bureau. Immigration in the working-age preservation scenario would create a population of nearly 706 million in 2060 — far more than double the current population.”
But simply analyzing population overlooks a significant factor. Reports abound about how robots will displace a great number of workers, perhaps 40 percent, in the not-too-distant future. So we simply will not need nearly as many workers — especially the low-skilled variety prevalent among today’s immigrants.
Yet immigrationists behave as if this isn’t a reality. They continue lecturing Americans about how immigration is necessary because, well, robots don’t vote Democrat, either.
Note also that low-skilled, unemployable immigrants (most of whom arrive with a quite socialistic mindset) are ideal for statists: They can add to a huge, dependent underclass all too willing to support handout-hawking demagogues.
This may also explain the plight of rejected higher-skilled immigrants such Christine Mikolajuk (video below), who was denied a green card despite seeming as American as apple pie. After all, being perfectly assimilated doesn’t perfectly fit the socialist-voter profile.
The CIS concludes that immigration won’t provide more workers or a younger population. But it will give us “a more densely settled country” and, many fear, “a deteriorating quality of life with a larger population, including an impact on such things as pollution, congestion, loss of open spaces, and sprawl.” The CIS asks, “Do we wish to go there?”
A serious immigration discussion would address this. Stopping the United States’ population growth requires stopping immigration, so when should this happen? When our number is 400 million? Five-hundred million? A billion?
Or should it be 325 million? To maintain this, our current population, requires ending immigration now.
Being serious would also acknowledge that an immigration debate is actually a discussion of what type of country we’re going to be. The citizenry makes the nation and government, not the other way around. Import unassimilable people — or fail to assimilate them — and you become something you weren’t before.
Apropos here, our second president, John Adams, warned that our “Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Thus should we always ask not just what skills immigrants bring, but what ingrained ideas. Will they be people our Constitution was made for, or some other?
Unfortunately, immigrationism — the dogma that immigration is always good, always necessary, must never be questioned, and must be the one constant in an ever-changing universe of policy — precludes this discussion. Even President Trump espouses it, saying in his State of the Union (SOTU) speech that he wanted immigrants “in the largest numbers ever.”
But given that virtually all today’s immigrants are Third Worlders and that balkanization is not only already a reality but is encouraged (SOTU Democrat respondent Stacey Abrams recently advocated more identity politics), in the future we may not be pressing one for English.
We may be pressing dos.
Photo: iStock / Getty Images Plus
