Glenn Beck: We Need One Billion People in the U.S.

AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley
AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley
Neil Munro

The United States needs one billion people to keep pace with China’s expanding strategic power, according to Glenn Beck, a BlazeTV network host.

“Having ONE BILLION AMERICANS is a goal worth striving for and crucial to keeping China from overtaking us as the top global power,” Beck tweeted after a conversation with progressive author Matt Yglesias, who has recently published a book urging the tripling of the U.S. population from 330 million to 1 billion.

Yglesias’s book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, calls for roughly 670 million additional residents, including both immigrants and native-born.

In 2013 and 2014, Yglesias supported the “Gang of Eight” amnesty, which would have flooded the U.S. labor market with approximately 30 million in ten years, boosted investors over wage earners, and shifted political power towards the pro-diversity progressives who are increasingly allied with Wall Street. 

Yglesias, a top editor at the progressive site Vox.com, told Beck:

We’re sort of the number one power in the world. We have been for a long time, 100 years or more. But that’s slipping, right? We are facing a sort of relative decline vis-à-vis China. Their economy is growing very rapidly. In a lot of ways, that’s a good thing; global poverty has gone down a lot. It’s good to see other people doing well. But when you have a country of 1.2 billion people, it’s four times our population. If they get to half of our per capita wealth, they become a much stronger economy than we are in the aggregate. Right. And so we should do something about that. Cracking down on Chinese video meme apps is not going to get the job done right. What we need to do is something bigger.

The claim prompted much criticism on Twitter:

Beck agreed with Yglesias but argued that incomers should work hard, speak English, and accept the civic and constitutional principles of the United States:

This is a place where you have no argument with most of the conservatives that I know. … I’m looking to understand. I don’t know where you get the view that conservatives don’t want immigrants. Donald Trump is a symptom. He is not a cause. He’s a symptom. He’s a symptom of [the elite] not listening to people who love their country, are worried about the culture of the country, worried about the Constitution. … We’re worried about the loss of things. And so what happens with immigration is you have wild open borders, which after September 11, we all should know that’s just stupid. …. But you also have lost the idea of merit. I think every conservative that I know has no problem with people coming in if they are going to come in and work, and they want to better their lives, which is almost every immigrant I have seen from, you know, Mexico and Latin America. They work far harder than most Americans, especially American kids. It renews us. It’s good. But we can’t lose the culture — meaning we can’t say, “We’re two languages, and it doesn’t matter what you think of the United States.” If you came here and you know why you came here and you’re willing to work, you are going to be the best American.

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Yglesias responded. “I wish that all conservatives thought the way you’re thinking about immigration.”

Beck added:

If you’re coming here to be able to say, “I want to be a part of this” without shedding who you are and what you brought, but melt into this, you’re still holding up the [civic and constitutional] principles, not [just] the flag … not that jingoistic crap; I hate that stuff because it obscures the principles, the principles that made us different. And if you hold up those principles, that’s, I think, what most people are worried about, the deep change.

Beck did not explain how the nation could accept almost two immigrants for every American, who would supercharge the progressive strategy of rule by chaotic diversity and exacerbate the existing cheap-labor trends that favor coastal stockholders and also preserve the nation’s civic and constitutional principles. 

Yglesias’s population 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,” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News on September 11. 

“What he is proposing is a nation-breaking policy,” said Krikorian. 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.

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”:

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