Tim Kane, a fellow at the Hoover Institute, wrote in the September 20 Fox News website that maintaining today’s million plus legal immigration flow is a national security issue. He wrote that the idea of cutting legal immigration to a level of 500,000 per year as recommended by the last national commission that offered a rational immigration reform plan and as endorsed by President Trump “…would have stunned…” the founding fathers. It is equally plausible that the founding fathers would have been overwhelmed by a mass arrival of a million immigrants a year. But whatever people who have been dead for 200 years might have thought about a 21st century issue, equating the early years of our republic, when it was being settled, with today’s about 325 million population is inane.
Kane equates population size with military power. That is similarly inane. Otherwise why would anyone care about Iraq’s nuclear program? Or, why wouldn’t Israel have been destroyed by it more populated neighbors?
The writer calculated that today’s country would be less populated by 100 million if immigration had been half of the actual number of arrivals. What that factoid should suggest is a number of benefits, not deficits. Some of the benefits if immigration had been more moderate would be:
- Cities that today are bursting at their seams would be more livable;
- The garbage dumps and landfills and garbage scows would be having less impact on the environment; and
- Our voracious consumption of non-renewable natural resources would be less threatening the future.