Arnold G. York
Immigration: What’s all the fuss about?
For more than 400 hundred years immigrants have been coming to America. Almost without exception, the people already here didn’t want them. Nevertheless, they kept coming, struggling to make a place in America, and ultimately almost always succeeded. Typically, the process of truly becoming an American takes about three generations. That story hasn’t changed in 400 years, nor have the gripes, which have shown remarkable consistency over American history.
They don’t look like us.
They don’t speak our language.
Their food is strange.
They don’t share our values.
They don’t want to be like us.
They expect us to change.
They’re a drain on the public purse.
Who needs them, anyway?
The simple truth is, we all do.
There is a whole group of reasons why we need immigrants. If you expect to ever retire and collect Social Security, we need a younger generation to support the system, and that means immigrants.
We need their labor.
We need them to buy our homes when we want to sell.
We need them to raise families and participate in political life.
We need young people to support things like health-care, and pay premiums in a system that is used, in large measure, by older Americans.
We’re not doing it by internal growth (meaning births) because we don’t have enough births. Look around. How many of your kids have five children? This phenomenon is not unique to us. It’s happening all over the Western world. Birth rates in the Western world are dropping like a stone. Improved healthcare keeps us all alive longer so we end up with larger but older populations, and we need younger people to keep it going. That typically means immigration.
People are on the move all over the world. In Western Europe they’re coming from the old Eastern block, and a large measure from the Muslim world. In America, they’re coming from Latin America and Asia.
You can’t get a handle on what’s happening without looking at numbers, which I know makes some of you just glaze over, so you can skip this part and I’ll summarize it down below.
Let me give you a few basic Census Bureau numbers. California has a current population of about 37 million-plus people. We’re the most populous state in the nation making up about 12 percent of the country. Texas is next and they have 23 million. We in California are well on our way to 45 million to 50 million, which is expected to hit in about 2025. If there is one thing that most population experts agree on, it is that there is very little anyone can do to change those trends.
The growing population is made up of a number of things. You add up all the people who are born in the state, plus all the people moving into the state, and then you subtract everyone who died and those who have moved out of state.
What the Census Bureau tells us is that from April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2006, a period of six years, California’s population increased 7.63 percent, which is slightly more than the overall average for the U.S., which saw a population growth of 6.4 percent, but not a heck of a great deal more. The increase in California came from natural births (5.64 percent), international migrations (5.09 percent) and was reduced by people moving out of the state (about 2.8 percent) and the balance is people who have died. If we keep growing at the same rate of 1.27 percent per year, our population will be more than 40 million in 10 years.
What’s the significance of these numbers in the great American immigration debate? Part of it is that a great deal of the debate is meaningless and just noise.
There are certain things we know.
We know we need population.
The entire industrialized world knows it needs population to keep its systems growing and healthy.
We need younger population to carry the burden for the larger portion of the old population who are no longer working, and it’s going to accelerate as the baby boomers retire.
I agree we do need some sort of immigration reform. We need to control our borders, but it’s never going to happen if we pretend we don’t need those people. We do need them, and what we have to do is set up a sensible system, and try and control the flow. This obviously includes some sort of amnesty for the 12 million illegal immigrants already here, or it will never work. Besides, can you imagine trying to catch and deport 12,000,000 people? It’s absurd.
P.S. For those of you who think immigration reform means the end of America as we know it, I’d suggest you start looking up the names of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies. The names come from countries all over the world and their ancestors came for pretty much the same reason, because this country is safe and affords opportunity. I can also almost guarantee you there is some young woman crossing the Rio Grande today whose grandson or great grandson is going to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.