High immigration = low living for average Americans

Joseph Cotto
July 30, 2014
Communities Digital News

OCALA, Fla., July 30, 2014 — America is going through some rough economic times. Hardships are felt mainly among the working and lower middle classes, whose median wages have been in decline for decades. During the years ahead, though, things might get worse for white collar workers with the rise of tech-savvy immigrants from Asia.

It seems that large-scale immigration is good for landowners, but not renters, in a manner of speaking.

Last year, urban designer and public policy analyst Michael E. Arth told me that “American politicians spend half their time begging for money from the business interests who control public policy, and the rest of the time giving their paymasters what they want while pretending to represent the people.

“People who sell stuff want a growing pool of consumers, so it’s not in their perceived self-interest to support low birth rates. Also, some think we need a constantly growing population so the young can take care of the old. The information explosion, robotics and people living indefinitely long (while remaining youthful) will eliminate this problem, while also exacerbating the overpopulation problem.”

Also in 2013, Craig Lewis, the executive director of Negative Population Growth, said “(a)s America continues to ignore the problem of overpopulation, our size continues to grow larger and our resources continue to dwindle. Our infrastructure decays, unemployment rises, our roads and hospitals become more crowded, our environment continues to deteriorate, schools and universities become more expensive and more competitive for our young people, and more of our green spaces vanish.

“At some point, it is inevitable — we will reach ‘critical mass’  in our population size. We will be forced to address the situation, and we will have to make difficult decisions as a nation. Under those circumstances, elected officials will have no choice but to take a position on the issues. We can only hope that, once they begin to face reality, it won’t be too late.”

During last year as well, Jo Wideman, the executive director of Californians for Population Stabilization, stated that “overpopulation is a fact, not a myth.

“Human innovations — medicines and antibiotics, fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation, exploitation of fossil fuels, the Green Revolution, etc. — have allowed for a higher standard of living and quality of life for most of the world’s 7.2 billion inhabitants. And these advances have occurred in spite of a global population that quadrupled over the last century, and grows by 80 million annually.

“These increases in human numbers and overall rates of resource and energy consumption are not, however, sustainable. They have taken place at great ecological cost, enabled by the ongoing depletion of non-renewable natural resources, over-exploitation of renewable natural resources, and the accelerating degradation and disruption of environments — air, water, lakes, ocean, atmosphere, climate — upon which the modern industrialized human economy, and indeed civilization itself, depends.

“To believe that the human capacity for innovation is infinite, and that therefore human populations can grow infinitely, is to believe in fairy tales. It is to believe in a parallel universe in which we live on a flat earth, because only a flat earth extending infinitely in all directions — as opposed to a round earth, which is bounded and finite — could support a human population that never stopped growing.”