The United States should absorb as many as 11 million immigrants each year into its economy, NPR “Planet Money” founder Adam Davidson writes in The New York Times Magazine.
“Few of us are calling for the thing that basic economic analysis shows would benefit nearly all of us: radically open borders,” he writes.
His proposal would double the current U.S. population in only 29 years to over 637 million people.
“If largely open borders were to replace our expensive and restrictive lottery system, it’s likely that many of these immigrants would travel back and forth between the United States and their native countries, counteracting the potential brain drain by sharing knowledge and investment capital,” Davidson says. Unlikely, considering that the U.S. grants citizenship to the children born to aliens who violate immigration and can sponsor chain-migration of their most distant relatives.
Extrapolating from a study conducted by economist David Card that claimed importing 125,000 Cubans into Miami, Florida, in 1980 had “no measurable impact on wages or employment,” Davidson demands that America accept levels of immigration that are several orders of magnitude beyond what the country endures now.
Americans who want to trim the number of visas the U.S. hands foreign workers during tough economic times probably think President Obama is a Muslim, Davidson sneers.
According to Pew, roughly as many people (18 percent of Americans) believed in 2010 that President Obama was a Muslim as believe today that undocumented immigrants should be expelled from the United States. Of course, that 18 percent can make a lot of noise. But for everyone else, immigration seems to be going the way of same-sex marriage, marijuana and the mohawk — it’s something that a handful of people freak out about but that the rest of us have long since come to accept.
Allowing tens of millions of people to stream into the country is exactly like tolerating an unconventional haircut, according to Davidson. He also sets up a bizarre straw-man argument that restrictionists allegedly use. “Logically, if immigrants were ‘stealing’ jobs, so would every young person leaving school and entering the job market; countries should become poorer as they get larger. In reality, of course, the opposite happens.”
That’s not “logical”; it’s an brain-teaser-like smear of anyone who is skeptical of mass immigration. Davidson implies that Americans displaced by foreign workers subscribe to an idiotic belief that the more people are employed, the poorer the country becomes. While it lets liberals look down on the hopelessly backward middle class, it vandalizes intellectual conversations about immigration.
Consider the extreme nature of what Davidson is saying: Every year, the U.S. should legalize the equivalent of a very low-ball estimate of the illegal alien population currently squatting on U.S. territory—11 million foreigners. Ignoring the massive social, economic, and demographic upheaval already damaging American civil society and bankrupting law enforcement, Davidson attacks Americans for noticing mass immigration’s destructive results—results which liberals celebrate. Americans “are, collectively, still jealous, nervous creatures, hoarding what we have, afraid of taking even the most promising risk, displaying loyalty to our own tribe while we stare, suspiciously, at everyone else,” he sighs.
In other words, because liberals believe that because non-liberals are bigoted and are upset with them for opposing liberal designs, they seek to actively disenfranchise them, crowd them out of the job market and overwhelm them politically with immigrants who come from autocratic, despotic countries with no tradition of free speech or even a stable political order. President Obama has explicitly stated this several times in his second term, by telling amnesty beneficiaries that there will be a “President Rodriguez someday,” by expressing hope that America will dissolve into a snarling “hodge podge” of mutually incompatible cultures that will drown conservatism, and by endorsing mandatory voting after legalizing millions of aliens dependent on welfare checks taken out of taxpayers’s hides. The foreigners who have an alleged “right” to come to America have no responsibilities to any native-born citizen, whether they be white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, Asian, Catholic, Protestant, agnostic, rich, poor, young, elderly, anything, Davidson implies.
Liberals like Obama and Davidson demand mandatory celebrations of “diversity” and immigration precisely because they hurt Americans. Afterwards, they mock conservatives and other non-liberals for worrying about the very real harms that liberals trumpet. This will sometimes take the form of a lie which liberals gleefully tell to enrage helpless Americans. Importing tens of millions of foreign workers into the labor market every single year won’t hurt American workers, Davidson asserts: “Most economists now believe that Card’s findings were correct: Immigrants bring long-term benefits at no measurable short-term cost.” No short-term cost, eh? The IT professionals forced to train their alien replacements and victims murdered by Obama’s DREAMers might beg to differ.
For his self-professed “maturity” and “rationality,” Davidson makes no effort to look at the bigger picture. While encouraging a mass invasion on a scale never before seen in world history, he overlooks one key detail: Automation is expected to take up to half of all American-created jobs in only ten years.
Mocking Americans for fearing the destruction of the economy they built and the political system they have sustained for over 226 years is the point of Davidson’s piece, and the impetus driving calls on the Left for more immigration. What animates much of the discussion surrounding immigration policy is naked hatred for conservatives and contempt for American workers, a mostly unremarked-upon phenomenon.
Email Katie at kmchugh@breitbart.com.
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