Steering Toward Population and Immigration Sanity

The United States is the world’s highest-consuming nation. Our per capita level of consumption is severely magnified by our large population which has now exceeded 308 million. While we try to steer our country around financial disaster, our booming population continues to grow as fast as many third-world countries. Indeed, since 1945 our population growth rate has rivaled that of India. California has been growing faster than Bangladesh. Current U.S. population policy is one of deliberate default, resulting in U.S. population growth of over 3 million people each year. While this meets the requirements of the Chamber of Commerce, such endless physical growth is ultimately doomed. We simply can not grow forever within the confines of our nation’s borders. As we grow now, we pave the way for our childrens’ misfortunes. The good news is that American women voluntarily achieved replacement level fertility (2.1 children per woman) in 1972. Yet population momentum would still have driven our population to keep growing for several decades. After that, population would have gradually tapered back to sustainable levels. This is because it takes a period of time equal to the average life expectancy (approximately three generations or 73 years in the U.S.) for a reduction in fertility to be realized as a change in actual population numbers. The bad news is that we are still operating under a government-mandated program of forced population growth. While a larger political rudder might better steer our population policy, our population throttle remains wide open in the form of external migration into our overcrowded country. The reason is that the United States takes in over one million legal immigrants into our country every year. This is more than all other countries combined – making the US is most generous immigration nation on the planet. Yet we also take in close to 3 million illegal aliens each year who sneak into our country and evade apprehension at our border. That’s a lot of people for a high-consuming country which is already depleting the resources of other nations, let alone our own (oil is but one example).  Indeed mass immigration is driving US population to double within the lifetimes of children born today. Fortunately some states are beginning to wrest control of immigration policy back from the feckless feds who refuse to enforce existing immigration law (like interior enforcement and securing our borders).  Earlier this month, Georgia passed HB 87 which requires use of the federal E-Verify program to prevent employers from hiring illegal alien labor to take jobs Americans will do. And the United States Supreme Court just upheld Arizona’s mandatory requirement for use of E-Verify. This astounding win for state-based interior enforcement has moved the policy rudder significantly towards the direction of immigration sanity – and undoubtedly has left the open borders subversives crying in their beer. Yet there is more to be done to re-chart our country’s demographic future. The most important steps in this direction are to: *  Enact similar E-Verify laws in all of the states. *  Secure the border from unarmed – and armed – invasion. *  Eliminate the anchor baby misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment giving citizenship to the children born to illegal aliens. It is time to steer our country in the direction of population and immigration sanity… for the sake of America’s children… of all races.