Immigration to America Is Not What It Used to Be

... According to CarryingCapacity.org, the United States “now accepts over one million legal immigrants each year, which is more than all of the other industrialized nations in the world, combined.” Additionally, according to ImmigrationCounters.com, nearly 28 million illegal immigrants currently live in the United States....

According to a study conducted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the cost to America taxpayers to provide illegal immigrants government funded education, health care, justice and law enforcement, public assistance, and general government services is estimated at $135 billion per year. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “63% of non-citizen households access welfare programs compared to 35% of native households.”...

Why Immigration to America Today Is Different

1. Immigrants today are not coming from nations of equal or greater economic achievement. In the past, immigrants from Europe, for the most part, were emigrating from nations that were as advanced as the United States was, if not more so. Today the overwhelming majority of immigrants are coming from developing nations.
    
2. Immigrants in the past came primarily from European nations which had cultural values—educational, religious, and political—that were, if not nearly identical to American cultural values, at shared a similar trajectory towards achieving those values. Immigrants today come from nations that, relatively speaking, have far fewer cultural similarities to America than past waves of immigrants.
    
3. Immigrants today, for the most part, are coming from nations that are rapidly increasing in population and, in aggregate, dwarf the United States in population. Related to this is the fact that in the past, the people already in America were themselves rapidly increasing in population, but this is no longer the case, except among populations of recently arrived immigrants.
    
4. Immigrants today arrive via 10-hour hops on an airliner. In the past, waves of immigrants spent 10 months traversing land and sea in a journey of staggering expense and significant dangers. While this isn’t universally true, particularly for the overland migrants that cross America’s southern border, the general point stands: coming to America today does not require the commitment it required in the past.
    
5. Similarly, in the past, immigrants pretty much renounced their countries of origin. They made a one-way trip and they adopted the language and values of America. Today, retaining cultural unity with one’s country of origin is a few clicks on the internet, a cheap telephone call, an affordable airfare. Technology has greatly eroded the forces that used to impel immigrants to become Americans.
6. Immigrants in the past arrived in an America that had a voracious need for unskilled workers. Today the American economy is relentlessly automating jobs that used to require unskilled labor, and the American population already has a surplus of unskilled workers.
7. Immigrants today are arriving in a welfare state, where they are assured of food, shelter, and medical care that are, in general, orders of magnitude better than anything available to them in their native countries. This creates a completely different incentive to today’s immigrants. In past centuries, immigrants came to America to find freedom and to work. Today they are offered a smorgasbord of taxpayer-funded social services.
    
8. Immigrant students today—especially in the coastal urban centers where most of them settle—enter a public education system that teaches them with a reverse-racist, anti-capitalist bias. They are taught in our public schools not to assimilate, but to “celebrate diversity”; not to earn opportunities through hard work, but through fighting discrimination. They are taught, often in their native language, that they have arrived in a nation dominated by racist and sexist white males, who exploit the world to amass evil profits.

Recipes for Disaster

These final three points are the most troublesome. If immigration reform advocates made those a priority and addressed them decisively with new policies, the other concerns might be manageable. But we must address the problems caused by immigrants with low job-skills, who encounter the welfare state, and are subjected to anti-Western cultural messaging....

Similarly, it is a recipe for disaster to allow immigrants into an America where the curricula in K-12 schools and universities—beholden to powerful left-wing teachers and faculty unions—indoctrinates immigrants to resent the alleged evils of capitalism and the incorrigible racist, sexist core of our American culture. This is particularly true when accompanying this siren song of corruption is easy access to social services of all kinds, including welfare. If new immigrants are taught the cards are stacked against them, and at the same time they are offered a free ride that provides a standard of living many times greater than what they knew in the countries they came from, why work?

Clearly an increasing population, all else held equal, does cause overall economic expansion. It isn’t clear at all, however, that this is the optimal way to create economic expansion. First of all, global human population is destined to level off by 2050 anyway^*, so rather than expanding the population through immigration, economic policy needs to search for the answer as to how to continue to experience economic growth despite a stable, aging population...

* Actually, the article is incorrect. See:

Overpopulation not solved, by Fred Elbel, CAIRCO, December 30, 2018.

World Fertility - The World's Most Important Graph, by Fred Elbel, CAIRCO, May 9, 2017.

Population Driven to Double by Mass Immigration.

Population and Immigration Data, Projections and Graphs - Colorado.

Population and Immigration Data, Projections and Graphs - United States.

Overpopulation not solved, by Fred Elbel, CAIRCO, December 30, 2018.

The Most Overpopulated Nation, by Paul R.Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Negative Population Growth, January 16, 2019.

Replacement Migration: Almost All Population Growth In United States Will Result From Immigrants, by James Kirkpatrick, VDare, February 10, 2019.