The government should import more than 500 million migrants to inflate the nation’s geostrategic power against China, according to the left-wing author of a new book.
“To stay on top, we probably need to grow the country threefold [from 330 million] — to one billion Americans,” says an August 31 op-ed by Matthew Yglesias, an elite-leftist progressive founder of Vox.com.
That idea “is the most ludicrous manifestation of a pretty widespread view of immigration as a tool for America’s elite to compete with the rest of the world,” responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Immigration policy should “serve the interests of individual Americans,” rather than the personal interests of globalist advocates, he said, adding:
For all his flaws, [President Donald] Trump understands that government policy, including the federal immigration program, should be designed to help Americans thrive and live better lives. It is not to play some kind of geopolitical chess game.
What should be more important for the U.S. government? The gas station attendant in Iowa or the state of geopolitics in Burundi? The gas station attendant is the one whom the American government is supposed to serve.
Despite Trump’s election, many officials in the federal government are eager to use national immigration for their particular foreign policy goals, he said. For example, he said, the Department of State will find “people who are creating geopolitical problems [such Nepalese migrants in next-door Bhutan] and toss them over their shoulder back into America-land. Then the problem is solved because there are no more Nepali refugees in Bhutan, and everything’s great.”
Yglesias argues that the myriad domestic problems that will be caused by his one-billion-people strategy against China can be fixed once his population policy becomes law:
Of course, tripling the population could also cause a number of problems. Traffic jams could get worse. Rent could go up. Water access would be stretched thinner. There’d be more pollution. These are, unfortunately, real concerns. And the exact details of how best to structure family-support programs, how best to pay for them, exactly which additional immigrants to let in, and how to improve our infrastructure and increase our housing stock are good subjects to argue about. But think of how much healthier our politics would be if there were really a debate about how to accomplish great things rather than a food fight over semi-imagined offenses to “real Americans.”
By putting quote marks around “Real Americans,” said Krikorian, Yglesias is “mocking the concerns of critics. … He’s questioning the idea that Americans have any right to defend their own interests.”
The damage of mass migration include the dilution of political and workplace power by ordinary Americans, the civic and economic turmoil caused by chaotic diversity, and the shift of economic power and of real-estate wealth from innovative Americans to coastal corporations.
“What he is proposing is a nation-breaking policy,” said Krikorian. “That’s not something you can just work out with better welfare policies.”
Krikorian added, “It is almost comical to hear from the left-wing editor of Vox that we need to be engaging in a geopolitical population race with China. … It is as if [Sen.] John McCain got reincarnated.”
Immigration shifts wealth from wages to stocks, from young to old, from central states to the coasts, from the many to the few.
Yes, migrants get huge relative gains in pay & civic life by moving into US.
But investors skim the $$ from the diversity#H1Bhttps://t.co/PVA75K3v9T— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 21, 2020
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