Mass immigration means massive problems for America

By Joseph Cotto
August 5, 2014
As seen in:
Communities Digital News

OCALA, Fla., August 5, 2014 — If you oppose immigration amnesty, chances are that accusations of “racism”, “bigotry”, and who knows what else won’t be far off.

What about people who support lowering rates of legal immigration? Throwing out labels and platitudes designed to scare away debate aren’t as potent then.

So, to shed light on a little-discussed matter, how do our current immigration trends impact public education?

“As David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club, said, ‘Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of that problem. It has to be addressed.’ In the U.S., immigration is the primary driver of population growth,” Jo Wideman, the executive director of Californians for Population Stabilization, one of America’s foremost groups addressing population-related issues, told me last year. “The Pew Research Center reported in 2008 that 82 percent of the projected increase in the U.S. population between 2005 and 2050 will be due to immigrants (47 percent) and their U.S. born descendants (35 percent).

“In a technology-driven world, the global winners will be those with well-educated workforces, not those with the most bodies. Large-scale immigration has impeded education by contributing to crowded classrooms and by swamping schools with students who speak little or no English, creating a difficult learning environment. Also the sheer volume of immigration, often from non-English speaking societies (meaning that scarce staffing and budgetary resources have to be redirected toward ESL), has placed enormous stress on the physical and financial resources of affected school districts around the country.”

On a different note, some believe that America needs mass immigration now more than ever. They say that such a thing will reinvigorate the economy.

“The miracle economies of the past half century — Japan, then the Four Tigers, then China, then BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) — have been achieved without significant immigration, probably net emigration in some cases,” Wideman said. “Today, Germany has a robust economy while Spain has a moribund economy with massive unemployment. Neither has significant immigration, so the economic differences lie elsewhere.

“The impact of immigration on the economy is complicated, but it is clear that immigration is not needed to drive economic growth. As the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council found after an exhaustive analysis, ‘Overall, in the massive and complex U.S. economy, immigration is unlikely to have a very large effect on relative earnings or on gross domestic product per capita.’ As a matter of fact, implementing an amnesty is predicted to cost trillions of dollars.”

Now that’s something to remember next time folks start with their usual business of anti-immigration advocates being “haters” or some such nonsense.