I have been blogging for some time that immigration is "not" good. Almost everyone seems to feel that immigration is good for the economy. That is clearly a myth! I will try to explain how many have been taken in by this myth in this blog.
To evaluate a decision, you first need some kind of objective to judge a decision against. I'll deal with that first. Here is a list of possible objectives.
(1) Help poor people around the world by allowing them to move to the USA for the good life.
(2) Make the economy "bigger" by allowing in people who can produce some "value added", no matter how small that amount might be.
(3) Make decisions that improve the quality of life for the people who are citizens of the USA including their kids and grand children.
(4) Make decisions that raise the "median family income" and avoid those that lower it, given that median income is the main driver of median quality of life.
With any list of objectives, they are bound not to be mutually exclusive and may actually be in conflict. I think that my list above is a good example. Take (1), if helping poor people around the world by letting them immigrate into the USA is "good", it is also "bad" at the same time. You need to be able to answer whether the decision "nets" out positive for the USA. More immigrants lower the quality of life by making the USA poorer and more congested with less and less free space. New immigrants tend to be breeders of big families and thus do much more future damage to the USA over time.
How about (2)? I don't know how many simple minded people that I have heard saying that poor immigrants take jobs that our people do not want to take and that they pay taxes and contribute to the economy. This may be partly true, but it misses the main point and that is, it lowers the median family income and makes us poorer. The pie may be a little bit bigger, but the size of the pie that the median person gets is "smaller". That seriously violates objective (4) and you can't do that if you want USA to be a better place to live.
How about (3)? Most people can not see beyond their noses and do not take into account the future implications of their knee jerk actions. The future of the USA and the future of our children is not something that short term thinkers have any business playing with. My family has been here for over 30 generations and during that time, they were always working for the "future" of the USA and their unborn children. I don;t want to see anyone sell out our future for some kind of short term gain!
Finally, it is very difficult to raise median family income by just value added labor alone. Our economic history has been based on the exploitation of our natural resources from day one. It has been supplemented with value added labor like making shoes or building cars, but few of those workers ever earned much more than the median level income. Before Obama became President, the median family income was about $55,000. Now, it is down to about $47,000! Many very skilled hard working people earn much more than the $55,000 or $47,000, but it does not raise the median family income because there is not enough of them. An average person mining Gold or drilling an oil is easily "worth" more than the median family income. More immigrants do not help Gold mining or oil well drilling or farming. It just means we have more mouths to feed from the pot!!
Who do you think that the children of immigrants are going to vote for? The party who let their parents immigrate here and allowed them to live on welfare, that's who!! No wonder Obama and the Democrats want to let in more and more immigrants. They don't really care about the immigrants or the welfare of the USA, all they want is to stay in power!! States like California and New York are a couple of the poorest educated states now while places like Iowa, and the Dakotas are the best. Why do you think that is????
To evaluate a decision, you first need some kind of objective to judge a decision against. I'll deal with that first. Here is a list of possible objectives.
(1) Help poor people around the world by allowing them to move to the USA for the good life.
(2) Make the economy "bigger" by allowing in people who can produce some "value added", no matter how small that amount might be.
(3) Make decisions that improve the quality of life for the people who are citizens of the USA including their kids and grand children.
(4) Make decisions that raise the "median family income" and avoid those that lower it, given that median income is the main driver of median quality of life.
With any list of objectives, they are bound not to be mutually exclusive and may actually be in conflict. I think that my list above is a good example. Take (1), if helping poor people around the world by letting them immigrate into the USA is "good", it is also "bad" at the same time. You need to be able to answer whether the decision "nets" out positive for the USA. More immigrants lower the quality of life by making the USA poorer and more congested with less and less free space. New immigrants tend to be breeders of big families and thus do much more future damage to the USA over time.
How about (2)? I don't know how many simple minded people that I have heard saying that poor immigrants take jobs that our people do not want to take and that they pay taxes and contribute to the economy. This may be partly true, but it misses the main point and that is, it lowers the median family income and makes us poorer. The pie may be a little bit bigger, but the size of the pie that the median person gets is "smaller". That seriously violates objective (4) and you can't do that if you want USA to be a better place to live.
How about (3)? Most people can not see beyond their noses and do not take into account the future implications of their knee jerk actions. The future of the USA and the future of our children is not something that short term thinkers have any business playing with. My family has been here for over 30 generations and during that time, they were always working for the "future" of the USA and their unborn children. I don;t want to see anyone sell out our future for some kind of short term gain!
Finally, it is very difficult to raise median family income by just value added labor alone. Our economic history has been based on the exploitation of our natural resources from day one. It has been supplemented with value added labor like making shoes or building cars, but few of those workers ever earned much more than the median level income. Before Obama became President, the median family income was about $55,000. Now, it is down to about $47,000! Many very skilled hard working people earn much more than the $55,000 or $47,000, but it does not raise the median family income because there is not enough of them. An average person mining Gold or drilling an oil is easily "worth" more than the median family income. More immigrants do not help Gold mining or oil well drilling or farming. It just means we have more mouths to feed from the pot!!
Who do you think that the children of immigrants are going to vote for? The party who let their parents immigrate here and allowed them to live on welfare, that's who!! No wonder Obama and the Democrats want to let in more and more immigrants. They don't really care about the immigrants or the welfare of the USA, all they want is to stay in power!! States like California and New York are a couple of the poorest educated states now while places like Iowa, and the Dakotas are the best. Why do you think that is????
