America’s Hypocritical and Self-Destructive Attitude About Immigrants

   

For a nation of immigrants, where US citizens are well below demographic replacement numbers (our population is contracting fast) needed to sustain economic growth, where highly educated skills as well as the bottom level jobs are desperately short of local available workers, where we have relegated upward mobility to history books by making education hideously expensive, where scientific and medical expertise are resented and denigrated in favor of populist conspiracy theories, WE ARE BECOMING A NATION OF SELF-DESTRUCTIVE IDIOTS USING HYPOCRISY AND CRUELTY AS OUR TOOLS OF CONTROL. And in the process cutting off our nose to spite our collective face.

We are a contracting population: “3.59 million [is the] number of children born in the U.S. in 2023, a 2% drop compared with 3.66 million in 2022 and the lowest number since 1979, according to provisional federal data. The U.S. fertility rate also fell last year—to 1.62 births per woman, a 2% decrease from a year earlier, the data showed. It’s a new low and a sign of years of decline.” Wall Street Journal, April 25th. 2.1 live births per woman is what it takes just to hold the population steady. Home construction, restaurant operations and hospitality and food supply labor costs are soaring, feeding inflation, because there aren’t sufficient workers willing to accept those jobs at the bottom of the workforce.

Our biggest tech companies are locating new research facilities outside the US, because the United States, with some of the most expensive higher education costs on earth, simply does not graduate enough STEM workers… and we are blocking immigrants with the necessary qualifications. For students of history, this anti-immigrant, anti-educated-elite, anti-science wave sweeping this country is reminiscent of the decline that pushed the Netherlands from the top performing nation on earth for 200 hundred years to stagnation, allowing Britain to soar to the top, in the 1700s. We are hurting ourselves exactly the same way.

We ignore that many of these wannabe immigrants knocking at our southern border are 1. fleeing cartel dominated de facto civil wars – fed by easy gun purchases in the US with the revenues to buy those guns generated from American narcotics users – and 2. desertification-destroyed farms, tanked by America’s globally leading emissions of greenhouse gasses during the industrial revolution that made us rich and powerful. Congress is still grappling with a “big picture” solution to that border crisis but will not do what needs to be done, and the optics remain terrible.

Yet we are still a nation of immigrants to this very day. “More than half of the foreign-born population in the United States lives in just four states — California, Texas, Florida and New York — and their numbers grew older and more educated over the last dozen years, according to a new report released recently by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“In 2022, the foreign-born population was estimated to be 46.2 million people, or almost 14% of the U.S. population, with most states seeing double-digit percentage increases in the last dozen years, according to the figures from the bureau’s American Community Survey… In California, New Jersey, New York and Florida, foreign-born individuals constituted more than 20% of each state’s population. They made up 1.8% of West Virginia’s population, the smallest rate in the U.S.

“Half of the foreign-born residents in the U.S. were from Latin America, although their composition has shifted in the last dozen years, with those from Mexico dropping by about 1 million people and those from Central and South America increasing by 2.1 million… The share of the foreign population from Asia went from more than a quarter to less than a third during that time, while the share of African-born went from 4% to 6%.

“The report was released as immigration has become a top issue in the 2024 presidential campaign, with the Biden administration grappling with an unprecedented influx of migrants at the southwestern border… Immigration is shaping the 2024 elections in a way that could determine control of Congress as Democrats try to outflank Republicans and convince voters they can better address problems at the border.

“The Census Bureau report didn’t provide estimates on the number of people in the U.S. illegally… However, the figures show that more than half of the foreign-born are naturalized citizens, with European-born and Asian-born people leading the way with naturalization rates at about two-thirds of their numbers… However, the figures show that more than half of the foreign-born are naturalized citizens, with European-born and Asian-born people leading the way with naturalization rates at about two-thirds of their numbers.

“Around two-thirds of the foreign-born population came to the U.S. before 2010… The foreign-born population has grown older in the last dozen years, a reflection of some members’ longevity in the U.S., with the median age increasing five years to 46.7 years… It also became more educated from 2010 to 2022, with the rate of foreign-born people holding at least a high school degree going from about two-thirds to three-quarters of the population.” Associated Press, April 14th. PS I have yet to meet a lazy Mexican, and I live in LA.

For those border-crosser not able to be released pending asylum processing (which now takes years), we are not above separating young children from their parents, placing people in exceptionally harsh “detention facilities,” making border crossing a deadly risk and shipping many asylum seekers by the busload to distant cities under false pretenses. And no, statistically there are fewer murderers, rapists and violent criminals in these recent immigration pools than we have with our own citizens. We don’t lose jobs from immigration; we create them. The engine of job creation in the United States is magnificently driven by immigrants, from Google to Tesla to just about every farm and construction site in the southwest.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time for Americans to rediscover what made this country great, embrace the immigration that is absolutely essential for a strong and growing economy, and stop fabricating theories resulting in immigration policies that work against our own best interests.