I’m going to ignore the idiotic stuff about being anti-immigration and whatever kind of ‘ist’. If those are your best arguments, explain why you lock your doors at home. While you try to figure out an answer that doesn’t make you sound like the hypocrite we know you are, the rest of us will move on to real stuff.
Immigration benefits the US like crazy. Uncontrolled immigration does not. Immigration is a detriment to most other countries. Uncontrolled immigration makes it worse.
For the US, we get the cream of any crop. So many people want to become Americans or at least live here that we can take the pick of the litter. That’s great for the US. We get doctors, architects, lawyers, nurses, computer programmers and every other highly skilled, expensive to train professional you can name. this is great for the US as retraining to American standards is a lot cheaper than having to educate them for twelve years and then send them through college.
Uncontrolled immigration where we throw open the borders or fail to enforce them does immense damage. It’s a myth that illegal immigrants only take jobs Americans don’t want. There are a few thousand jobs like seasonal agriculture that aren’t high draws for educated Americans but they also aren’t marketed to the unemployed or those on welfare. It’s an open question as to what would happen if Americans with fewer opportunities were given the chance at even the least desirable jobs. Companies that swore Americans didn’t want to process fish were proven very wrong after a raid on illegal immigration in Alabama.
Immigrants come from somewhere. That nation-state has already invested in that person’s education. All the work and innovation that person brings to the job goes to the country they work in which means the US benefits at the expense of the native country. Doctors come to the US to work in poor neighborhoods for a lot more than they’d have made back home but that means that the folks back home don’t get the benefit of that doctor. The best and the brightest want the easy opportunities available in the US. In many cases it is much easier to come to the US legally than to try and change things for the better at home.
It’s a whole lot easier to hop the fence. It takes motivation and drive to come to the US even illegally. These are the same folks that make changes where they are. But instead of making things better at home, they put all that drive and hard work into the US economy. The US gets even better but things back home do not.
Long term, over immigration even of the legal kind damages the US indirectly. We get the best and the brightest, the hardest workers, the most innovative, all those folks that will change things, often for the better. Their native countries get whatever is left. But economies need BOTH. You need the movers and shakers and you also need the solid, steady workers that would never move but will do whatever they are paid for. Other countries end up with a lot of hard working but not driven folks that will never innovate or try to change things. The country won’t grow like that because it can’t.
War, pestilence, natural disaster, bad hair days – things happen to shake up the status quo. A stagnant nation-state can’t respond well. An economy that wasn’t growing can be thrown into disaster pretty easily when it doesn’t have those driven folks and the innovators that will make the hard decisions, unlike their staid friends.
Understand, all innovators gets you an economy that crashes and burns even faster because these folks won’t get the boring but important stuff done. Economies and polities are best when there’s a mix of different kinds of folks. They can all look alike but they can’t all have the same temperament. Diversity is much more important when it’s not just skin deep.
Legal or illegal. it takes guts to pick up and move to another country and make it your home. That drive and motivation are just as important a resource as technical training is. All the more so when the native country has poor governance. The US would not be the country it is if Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and the like all decided it was easier to just move to France. When we take immigrants in, we’re also taking them away from their native countries and that substantively changes those countries over time, probably for the worse.
The US provided Mexico with an escape valve for all its excess internal political pressure for decades. It’s providing the same service for nations around the world now. The folks that might make a difference all come here. In the cases of real persecution, that’s a good thing as we provide security for them to try and influence people back home. But most of the time it just results in their native countries either staying the same or getting worse.
Political change is real but it’s slow and usually up close and personal. Social media won’t take the place of private conversation or in person speaking. To change a nation, someone has to actually be there.
Economies are similar. They need hard workers but they also need innovators on the ground. Sending money home has the same effect as borrowing for daily needs: it just digs a deeper hole. A nation-state’s economy has to be able to function on its own or it will eventually collapse. We’re seeing a spate of failed states now largely born of over extended borrowing and little to no genuine investment in the economy. Mom back home is going to buy groceries. She is not going to buy a business. The money helps keep a wobbly economy going but it won’t fix the real problems. Nation-states need innovators as well as movers and shakers for that.
Allowing uncontrolled immigration, even with the best of intentions, only destroys the native countries all the faster. Sure, the pressure is reduced but so is the labor pool. Money flows in but precious little is invested. Water poured out on concrete is useless; water poured out on a garden feeds a family. Sending money from American jobs is the former, not the latter.
It literally does not matter if America can sustain such immigration – we can’t in case your wondering – because people get fed up with being willing to work and unable to compete with lower cost immigrant labor. They also get fed up with being unable to buy a house because the demand becomes so high that supply will never keep up. They get REALLY peeved being told that they are hateful ‘ists’ because they have the temerity to think that their lives and rights matter, too. Eventually, the political tide rises and the politicians unwilling to halt immigration have to themselves find new jobs.
That breaking point comes long before America’s economy is swamped. It may take a bit of time but it doesn’t take that long. We’re seeing the signs of it now. America is a welcoming place but it does have its limits.
And should. If America actually tried to take in all 9 billion inhabitants of this planet all that would be accomplished is starving half of them to death before the other half smartened up enough to realize the US doesn’t have enough resources and they’d better go find some place that does.
That place exists. It’s called Planet Earth. Instead of everyone coming to the US, how about we help them make there home countries better? There’s lots we can do and most of it is cheap. A Pocket U edumacation is more than enough to get a real entrepreneur going and to provide know how for political activists. But the best thing we can do is also the hardest.
Close the door.
