Bloomberg Op-Ed: Immigrant Soldiers, Workers Needed for Geopolitical Power

A Nation of Immigrants
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

U.S. geopolitical power needs a steady supply of fresh immigrants to serve as soldiers and workers, according to a pro-migration op-ed in Bloomberg news.

“A large working-age population serves as a source of military manpower,” says the op-ed by Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He continues:

… a relatively young, growing and well-educated population is a wellspring of the economic productivity that underlies other forms of international influence … countries with healthy demographic profiles can create wealth more easily than their competitors [and] can also can direct a larger share of that wealth to geopolitical projects as opposed to pensions and health care.

Brands acknowledges — but denounces — the reality that immigration is largely unpopular among the voters who suffer from the resulting diversity, elite disengagement, job theft, and wage loss. That turmoil helped outsider Donald Trump win the White House in 2016. Brands dismisses the public’s measured response as “draconian … xenophobia … race-based politics,” and says:

… if current trends are any indication, the U.S. could easily squander its demographic advantages [over China and Russia] by enacting draconian immigration restrictions or simply destroying its image as a country that welcomes ambitious newcomers. Conversely, if the proportion of immigrants continues to rise while the white population shrinks, xenophobia and race-based politics could become more common and more toxic.

After making these dire predictions, Brands declines to offer the public anything in exchange for the diversity, political divisions, taxpayer costs, and wage losses caused by the government policy of “refreshing the population”:

If the U.S. is to keep its demographic edge, it will have to find ways of reconciling two competing imperatives: refreshing the population through immigration while preserving social and political stability.

Brands dismisses the public’s expectation that their government serves citizens and their children, and he instead echoes the 1960s demand that Americans must give up their homeland to become a “nation of immigrants” to help beat Russian communism.

In an October 2018 article for Time magazine, Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy explained the government-boosting origin of the “Nation of Immigrants” claim:

Few felt it as deeply as President John F. Kennedy. In his 1964 book A Nation of Immigrants, recently re-released, my great-uncle outlines the compelling case for immigration, in economic, moral, and global terms. “The abundant resources of this land provided the foundation for a great nation,” he writes. “But only people could make the opportunity a reality. Immigration provided the human resources.”

Both Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush strongly favored this cheap labor, high growth policy. In 1990, the first President Bush signed a bill doubling legal immigration, and in 2006 and 2007, George W. Bush pushed for a bill that would have further increased immigration.

In March 2019, the George W. Bush center released a video which effectively wrote Americans out of their own nation, while urging more immigration to spur national economic growth by reducing wages. “America’s story is an immigrant story,” says the video. “Now as before, American is a nation of immigrants,” says the video which refers to 280 million Americans as the “population,” “labor force,” “workers,” and even “natives.”

Brands’ pitch, however, ignores the recent report by President Donald Trump’s economic advisors which said the nation can continue to grow without an extra supply of foreign workers.

There are “plenty of [American] workers on the sidelines able to come off” and fill jobs in the growing economy, said Rich Burkhauser, a member of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors. Americans’ productivity is rising and more sidelined Americans are returning to the workforce as wages rise, said the report, titled, “Economic Report of the President.”

Investors and CEOs are increasingly desperate for an infusion of more foreign workers to lower the marketplace pressure for wage increases during 2019.

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after high school or university. The federal government then imports roughly 1.1 million legal immigrants, refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar guest workers and roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers, and it also tolerates about eight million illegal workers.

In 2019, because of catch-and-release rules mandated by Congress and the courts, the federal government also will likely release at least 350,000 Central American laborers into the U.S. job market, even as at least 500,000 more migrants sneak past U.S. border defenses or overstay their visas.

Overall, in 2019, the U.S. government will allow at least two million new foreign workers into the United States to compete for the starter jobs sought by the latest wave of four million U.S. graduates. The new migrants also undermine the 24 million other Americans and the roughly three million legal immigrants who have joined the workforce since 2014.

This federal policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth for investors shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white-collar graduates and blue-collar foreign labor.

This cheap labor economic policy forces Americans to compete even for low wage jobs, it widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Read the op-ed here. The comments are sharply critical.

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