Five reasons why US immigration must be halted immediately
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
By Carl Braun
Examiner.com
Decades of the Great Wave of Immigration
NumbersUSA
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Immigration is a tough issue to take on. A sacred right it seems that no one, most especially any one single member of Congress, is willing to address. Yet its impact on the United States is staggering. From employment, to the environment, to infrastructure, education…you name it, immigration takes its toll. To be sure, there are many positive benefits to a rigid immigration system that allows for individuals to come to the United Sates and bring with them desperately needed skills. Today however we have programs like the “Diversity Lottery” that allow 55,000 individuals from two dozen nations to get priority access to a “green card” or permanent residency based not on skills but on ethnicity and national origin. This program fulfills an imaginary need for more unskilled labor from Taiwan or North Korea. It is predicated on the false claim that America needs more diversity. It does not. We need to manage the diversity we have already, better helping immigrants to assimilate and contribute to the common good.
America desperately needs an immigration time-out. Here are five reasons why immigration to the US must be temporarily halted immediately.
1. With 14 million unemployed Americans in the worst recession since the great depression we cannot afford the luxury of adding 1.5 million new workers and their families each year. Until the US stabilizes its economy and finds work for the existing citizens and permanent residents, it has no business allowing more immigrants to settle here.
2. According to the 2008 US Census Bureau projections America will grow from 308 million people to 400 million people in 2040. That is a 33% increase in population in just 30 years and per a Pew Research study, 82% of it comes from immigration and births to immigrants. That is a number equivalent to the entire population of the western US today, added in just 30 years. The drain on infrastructure and impact on education is enormous particularly in California where we must construct a new school every single day in perpetuity just to handle the influx of children to legal and illegal immigrants.
3. It is not just infrastructure that is impacted but the environment also takes a big hit. In a world gone mad over Global Warming the last thing we should be doing is increasing everyone’s carbon footprint. Right? Yet according to a study conducted by Californians for Population Stabilization, immigrants to the US quickly become Americanized and their carbon emissions skyrocket (see video below). The result is a quadrupling of immigrants' carbon footprint compared to the amount of carbon emissions they produced in their home countries. California is quickly becoming an environmental nightmare and while immigrants should not be blamed entirely for this, every bit of impact needs to be reviewed and analyzed before more people are added.
4. Economics is another area for review. Are immigrants, both legal and illegal a net gain or a net drain on the economy? Statistics seem to suggest that immigrants, at least initially, are indeed an expense to the taxpayer. At one time, immigrants needed to prove they had a job and a means to support themselves and their families. We need a return to those policies.
5. Stabilizing the population of the United States and in particular states like California needs to be a primary concern for all Americans. This state is broke. It got here by taxing the daylights out of its working citizens and giving the money to people whom either shouldn’t be here or should be paying their own way. Unchecked population growth is not only irresponsible it is downright dangerous to those who live and work here.
Immigration to the United States is not a right, though it seems there are many who believe it is. Their political motivations couldn’t be more clear. Every immigrant that comes into the country, legal or illegal, will one day vote for the politicians and the party that brought them here or gives them the most free stuff. How else can you explain the outright unwillingness by members of Congress to address this issue? You have to answer the question: Who Benefits? Those who are paying for the goodies will continue to lose.
The answer is an immigration “time-out” for two to five years so we can analyze who is here, what they are contributing to or taking from the taxpayer and what having them here does for this once great nation before it too falls into the third world abyss of poverty, overpopulation and crime. I am all for a rigid immigration process that allows for a careful replacement of the roughly 200,000 Americans we lose each year (net births over deaths). A process that is not based on race or ethnicity but on the long-term survival of the greatest nation this world has ever known for without this, its days are numbered.
Carl Braun is an analyst for the Homeland Security Policy Institute Group and he's logged 5,000-plus hours on the border. He has written several books including his most recent on Border Insecurity, “Above All Else”
. Contact Carl at Carl.Braun@BPAUX.org.
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For further information please refer to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
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