Atlantic Op-Ed: The Migration Wave Has Barely Begun

MCALLEN, TX - JUNE 12: Central American asylum seekers wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents t
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Americans need to reform their immigration laws before hundreds of millions of foreigners decide to take up residence in the United States, says David Frum, an author at the pro-globalist Atlantic magazine.

“If Americans want to shape their own national destiny, rather than have it shaped by others, they have decisions to make now,” says Frum, a Canadian-born Never Trump advocate who is also a consistent voice for the immigration reforms which would help young Americans rejuvenate American society.

Frum writes:

With immigration pressures bound to increase, it becomes more imperative than ever to restore the high value of national citizenship, not to denigrate or disparage others but because for many of your fellow citizens—perhaps less affluent, educated, and successful than you—the claim “I am a U.S. citizen” is the only claim they have to any resources or protection. Without immigration restrictions, there are no national borders. Without national borders, there are no nation-states. Without nation-states, there are no electorates. Without electorates, there is no democracy. If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do.

Americans are entitled to consider carefully whom they will number among themselves. They would be irresponsible not to consider this carefully—because all of these expensive commitments must be built on a deep agreement that all who live inside the borders of the United States count as “ourselves.” The years of slow immigration, 1915 to 1975, were also years in which the United States became a more cohesive nation: the years of the civil-rights revolution, the building of a mass middle class, the construction of a national social-insurance system, the projection of U.S. power in two world wars. As immigration has accelerated, the country seems to have splintered apart.

Many Americans feel that the country is falling short of its promises of equal opportunity and equal respect. Levels of immigration that are too high only enhance the difficulty of living up to those promises. Reducing immigration, and selecting immigrants more carefully, will enable the country to more quickly and successfully absorb the people who come here, and to ensure equality of opportunity to both the newly arrived and the long-settled—to restore to Americans the feeling of belonging to one united nation, responsible for the care and flourishing of all its people.

Frum’s article was written before homeland security chief Kirstjen Nielsen said March 6 that 900,000 migrants may cross the southern border this year. That is one migrant for every four Americans who will be born in 2019.

However, Frum’s task of persuasion is difficult because there are enormous social and professional pressure on his college-educated readers to go along with the cheap-labor immigration policies which are moving income and wealth from young employees up to older CEOs and investors

In Frum’s urban, college graduate, Internet surveillance environment, young people get exiled from their jobs when they notice that their wages are being shrunk, their rents are being inflated, and their politics are being poisoned by Wall Street’s use of immigration to stimulate corporate and stock growth.

Amid the threat of economic and social ostracism, few young graduates have the nerve and economic security to apply the law of supply and demand to the labor market, or to object as their jobs and hoped-for careers are quietly allocated to people who will rationally work for Spaghetti-Os and citizenship.

Read it all here.

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