I suppose in the midst of the political season it would be a
great time to post some politically charged idea and see where it leads. This is a bit of a divergence from what I
normally like to do here, but hey, it’s my blog so I’ll give it a whirl.
The topic I want to look at is immigration. It seems to me that there is an intense fear
of immigration among those who are adamant about closing down the borders. Of course those who support the lock down of
the borders will say, “I have nothing against immigration, I am only against ‘illegal’
immigration.” However in the course of
discussion with a majority of these people you will find that they want legal
immigration to be a very difficult process, which includes the learning of our
language, a better understanding of our government than most 20 year old
Americans have, along with countless other regulations that would make
immigration nearly impossible for any nominally educated person from south of
our borders. (Let’s be clear that when
people talk about securing our borders they are not usually talking about the
Canada or our Eastern or Western seaboards.)
Now the arguments against a loose immigration policy are
many, and we have heard most of them over and over again. Many of those arguments have some merit, or
are at least grounded in something that resembles truth. For instance, the people who come across the
border will need jobs, and we have limited jobs already. Or the people who come across the border will
force us to provide all sorts of bilingual amenities, signage, etc. There are a number of arguments that make
sense at face value. Of course there are
other arguments that seem to me to be a bit petty. “You know if we let them come in, we will
quickly become the minority.” (“We”
meaning people of European decent.) God
forbid our society becomes a shade darker over the next 100 years.
It seems to me that people who are in favor of a looser
immigration policy have done an absolutely horrible job of expressing to the
general public the great value of a looser policy. Usually their arguments surround around the
simple fact that immigration will actually be easier to control if there is
less incentive to do it illegally. There
is some validity to that argument, but it doesn’t even begin to touch upon the
real value of a looser immigration policy.
Here is why I am for loosening up our borders. The first thing we must realize is that our
entire society is essentially a pyramid scheme that relies on population growth
to sustain it. Social Security,
Medicare, Pension Plans, our very economy itself, is dependent on a growth of
consumption. If the economy is not
growing, it dies, period. Couple that
reality with the birth rate continuing to drop, and the age at which people
begin to have children continuing to go up, and the reality that our whole
system is in a precarious state becomes obvious. Loosened immigration allows for the population
growth that we are not achieving with our own birthrate. As you read this do not underestimate the
importance of this simple factor. Regardless
of how conservative or liberal your politics may be, the economy cannot sustain
a decline in population.
The other big thing to realize is that an immigrant comes in
with virtually nothing, and in most cases a legal immigrant catches on to the
American dream relatively fast. This
means that they need shelter, which means the production of homes and apartment
complexes needs to occur. They need
places of worship, requiring the construction of Churches. They need transportation, which necessitates
the building of cars. (The list could go on and on.) The very needs that an immigrant has are an
asset to our economy. It is no different
than the birth of child in the sense that it adds another consumer to the
economy. With an aging population that
is not replacing itself there is a desperate need of consumers to keep the economy
thriving. It’s not hard to get your mind
around this. If you work in a clothing
shop you want customers who need clothes, not those who simply browse, if you
are a realtor you want people who need houses not just nosey neighbors who drop
in at an open house. If you operate a
grocery store you hope that people with an empty pantry at home will stop in. It just makes sense. The greatest contributors to any economy are
people who have little who are working their tails off to obtain more. That is exactly what the immigrating populace
by and large is. The caricature of
immigrants being people who merely come across the border to obtain the social
services supplied by the US while not contributing anything themselves is
patently false, and if you have ever met a first generation immigrant I am
certain that you would concur with the falsity of that caricature.
There needs to be a distinction made, between the poor
immigrant, and the generationally impoverished American. We middle to upper class people tend to lump
poor people into some homogenous group, and it is sad that we do. We see poor people who seem to do nothing to
get out of poverty other than looking to what social services they can
receive. Certainly there are poor people
like that, whether they are at fault, or whether it is a generational thing can
be debated. However not all poor people
fall into that category. The
impoverished immigrant who comes across the border looking to work for a better
life has already (by their immigration) proven that they are in a different
class of poor. They are those who are
coming to make a life, obtain a dream, to earn and to purchase. Again the poor who seek a better life through
work and consumption are the greatest asset an economy can have, and a loosened
immigration policy provides our economy with a great influx of that type of
person.
I contest that in the not so distant future you will find
that countries with dwindling birthrates will begin to court immigrants and
actually attempt to draw them into their borders. If we don’t get on board with that idea,
eventually immigrants will choose to go elsewhere and we will have missed a
golden opportunity to make our economy more robust.
Obviously this whole post reduces people to mere economic
units, which is unfortunate. I have
almost dehumanized people by looking at them only to ultimate gain we receive
from them, that is not my heart in this.
My point is only to say that a loosened border is a positive economic
move for us, in fact I believe (unless we decide to start making babies fast)
it is a necessary economic move for us.
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