Is the U.S. Full? No, It’s Overfull
The latest pro-immigration talking point is that since the U.S. has an abundance of wide-open spaces, record legal immigration levels should continue, and perhaps even increase. While there may be some remote pockets across America where people have enough room to breathe, those open spaces are filling up fast. More immigration, already at more than 1 million annually, with no reduction in sight, would add to the overcrowding. If the objective is to cram as many inhabitants as possible into every square mile, then more immigration is the solution.
The argument immigration activists make – “there’s plenty of room” – ignores the more important point. The debate shouldn’t be about how many more people the U.S. can physically accommodate, but how many people the nation can sustain, and be certain that their quality of life will be consistent with the American way.
A quick look across the nation shows that a decent lifestyle is already far beyond reach for too many people. Homelessness exists in each of the 50 states, and is found in urban and suburban areas. The U.S. poverty rate is 13.4 percent, 43 million people; the uninsured rate is 13.7 percent. More immigration creates more competition for jobs and requires costly social services. While the U.S. can respond to many needs at one time, we’re failing on addressing homelessness, so adding more immigrants to the mix is the last thing that homeless, poor and uninsured people need.
Proponents for lower immigration levels have more persuasive, fact-based arguments for reducing the U.S. legal immigrant flow. With a 329 million population, and the world’s largest economy, the U.S. ecolological footprint exceeds its biocapacity, meaning that the country has an ecological deficit – by definition, an unsustainable living pattern. Instead, the U.S. is in a continuous overshoot status, which means residents use up more natural resources in about seven months than can be replaced in a single year.
Immigration and births to immigrants represent, according to the Census Bureau, population growth’s primary driver....
Neither Congress nor the immigration lobby disputes the population growth projections. Yet, to the inevitable detriment of all, nothing changes.
Related
Watch–George Will: America Needs ‘As Much Immigration as Economy Can Take’, Breitbart, June 11, 2019:
Never Trump, economic libertarian columnist George Will says the United States needs “as much immigration as the economy can take” to supply corporations with a never-ending flow of foreign workers and provide jobs to willing foreign nationals, no matter the cost to America’s working and middle class....
Will also said that the enormity of Big Tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook and their monopolized power over large swaths of the U.S. economy was a testament to capitalism “working.”...
To which Steve Sailer replied: