America Is Not the Common Property of All Mankind
Recently, I drafted an op-ed [Why Do We Need More People in This Country, Anyway?] asking whether the United States actually needs more people. Is 320 million—give or take, given the birthrates of those already here—enough? If not, why not? If we need more people, why? What do we need them to do?...
I don’t know what explains their [the open borders crowd] greater boldness now. It could be that they think they are on the cusp of victory, so caution is no longer necessary. I doubt this, however, given the 2016 election and moving of the Overton Window on the topic. A more likely explanation is that the open borders crowd is panicking....
The populace is roused. For the first time in a generation, it actually has political leaders trying to act in their interest. That is intolerable to the open borders crowd, which is reacting with fury and hysteria....
It’s high time to admit that there is no longer anything conservative, if there ever was, about the current crop of “neoconservatives.”... today’s crop is, or has relapsed into being, leftists pure and simple—ideologically and practically. Ideologically, they all want open borders and unending immigration....
Naïvecons’ Arguments for More Immigrants
[Bret] Stephens gives six reasons why the United States “needs” more immigrants....
Declining Fertility: Stephens begins with fertility. He asserts that high fertility is good without saying why.... Malthus may have been wrong in a lot of particulars, but he was surely right that no land—no finite territory with finite resources—can sustain unending population growth in perpetuity. One of the reasons—perhaps the reason—foreigners want to come to America is because their homelands are overcrowded, resources so stressed by population growth, that living standards remain very low, and in some cases even have declined. ...
Societal Aging: The second reason Stephens cites for needing more immigrants—societal aging—is really just a restatement of his first. Low birth rates lead to aging societies. Once again, he doesn’t say why this is bad. But this argument is made so often that we know where it leads. The implication is that we “need” more workers to shore up our entitlement system. This argument fails on a number of levels. First, those who study entitlements most closely insist that the system is unsustainable even with a vastly larger U.S. population. Promised benefits are too generous, they kick in too early, the Baby Boomer generation is too large, and modern lifespans are too long. We could cram 600 million people into the United States and still not solve the problem.