Today President Obama
announced his new immigration policy (1) largely designed to prevent
deportations of illegal immigrants from breaking up families. Certainly our
nation should not be too harsh on hard-working people who have come here for
economic opportunity and who have had children born in the US. However, I can’t help but
wonder if this policy will re-activate the floodtide of illegal immigration
that has taken place over the last two decades but that has recently shown
signs of subsiding.
We are often described as a
nation of immigrants and as a descendant of immigrants it is uncomfortable for
me to argue that the US should cease to provide opportunities for deserving
people. However the great surge of immigration in the 19th and early
20th centuries occurred in a very different setting than today. In
1900 the US population was 76 million. Today it is 320 million and is rapidly
climbing toward 500 million by mid-century primarily because of immigration and
the higher fertility rate of immigrants (2).
This raises the question of
how many people do we want in our nation? Do we really want 500 million, how
about a billion? Business interests always
favor population growth–more people, more sales more profits. But what about
the life-styles of average people? Do we really want to live in the sort of
ultra-crowded, polluted, degraded environment that is typical of China and
India today?
Another issue is jobs. The
combination of competition from abroad in manufacturing and the increased use
of automation and computers at all levels of economic activity is limiting
employment prospects for Americans. Whether it’s a highly trained software
engineer from Bangalore or a carpenter from Guatemala City, the net effect of
immigration is to further reduce opportunities for Americans. For the first
time in our history even college graduates are having a difficult time finding jobs.
Slowing immigration wont solve the problems caused by globalization and
automation, but it will mute the effects somewhat.
The US can’t address global
poverty by having the world’s poor move here. Indeed much poverty around the
globe is due to over-population. To this observer the intelligent approach for
our nation is a combination of stringent limits on immigration coupled with
strong support for population control and economic development in the poorer
nations of the world.
(2) http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/29/us-born-hispanics-overtake-immigrants/8456933/