Thirty Reasons for Immigration Reform Now!
1. Our population has increased six-fold since the 1850s. Does anyone really want this kind of an increase to recur leading to a population of 1.8 billion?
2. A vast largely unsettled continent lay before the Founding Fathers and their successors. Natural resources like water, timber, fish, arable land, game and minerals seemed limitless. Now we know better.
3. The “limit” of finite natural resources per capita as population increases without bounds is zero. (The more there are of us, the less there is for each of us!)
4. The top-priority campaigns of the nation's big environmental groups include endangered animals, pollution and global warming. The chief source of these and other challenges is immigration-driven U.S. population growth.
5. The United States is the world's third-most populous country, after China (1.3 billion people) and India (1.1 billion). Does anyone really want to emulate China and India in this regard?
6. The scientific data pretty much across the board shows that we in the U.S. are reaching many of the nation's ecological limits, one by one. Many of those limits are linked to population trends.
7. America's relatively high population growth and high rates of resource consumption and pollution make for a volatile mixture resulting in the largest environmental impact per capita ... in the world.
8. As we have seen in other parts of the world, growing population means encroachment on wildlife habitat, national parks and national monuments. In many cases, it also means abject poverty and misery. Let’s not go there.
9. Immigration laws are unduly complicated and give unfair advantage and preference to relatives of citizens or permanent residents who are then generally not counted against the established immigration quota. This aspect of the laws needs to be changed.
10. Under existing law, under certain conditions, parents of United States citizens may be sponsored for immigration by their adult citizen children (those at least 21 years of age). Instead, all adults should have to apply separately and be accepted or rejected based on their own skills, education, and other qualifications important to the U.S. economy. All should be counted against the overall immigration quota.
11. In the 1950s, the number of persons admitted for legal residence averaged around 200,000 per year. That is a reasonable goal for the future, especially if the quota is focused on those individuals who possess the skills or advanced education in physical science, math, engineering or medicine needed to keep the U.S competitive in the global economy.
12. We can reaffirm our rich tradition of welcoming immigrants who would benefit our country while rejecting those who would strain our budget and further stretch our finite natural resources. To do otherwise will certainly result in a decline in both our quality of life and standard of living.
13. Sentiment is not a sound basis for public policy. The purpose of the U.S. - including its immigration laws - is to benefit American citizens, as it says in the Constitution's preamble: " ... to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
14. Americans occupy about 20 percent more developed land per capita for housing, schools, shopping, roads and other uses than they did 20 years ago.
15. About 40 percent of the nation's rivers and 46 percent of its lakes are too polluted for fishing and swimming. Wetlands, the biological filters for water pollution, are shrinking by 100,000 acres a year, mainly because of development to serve excessive population growth.
16. Americans produce 20 metric tons of pollutants per capita annually. Even if by some technological miracle we were to be able to reduce our output by half to that of Mexico, we would have made no progress in reducing the present unacceptable level as our population doubles by the end of this century.
17. The fertility rate of American women is about at the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Therefore, population growth must be almost solely the result of legal immigration, illegal aliens, their progeny and their higher fertility rates.
18. It is difficult to imagine a more irrational and self-defeating legal system than one which makes unauthorized entry into this country a criminal offense and simultaneously provides perhaps the greatest possible inducement to illegal entry [birthright citizenship]. Jus soli, observed by less than 20% of the world's countries, must be replaced with jus sanguinis.
19. Written in the mid 1800s when immigration’s first peak was less than 50 years away and the U.S. population was only about 50 million, Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet, posted on the base of the Statue of Liberty, was an expression of her empathy for those who had fled the anti-Semitic Pogroms in Eastern Europe. The sonnet is a poignant reminder of our immigrant past but is not a basis for current policy. The operative word in the phrase immigrant past is the word “past.”
20. There are many things in our past: child labor, prohibition, lack of women’s suffrage, Jim Crow laws, and segregation. Few thinking Americans want to go back to that “past” yet some of us continue to cling to the idea of “our immigrant past” without a second thought about its appropriateness as a model for the fully-settled and fully-developed America of today with more than 300 million people.
21. The achievement of a stable population must be a part of the public dialogue on immigration on immigration reform.
22. Our traditions clearly need to be rebalanced to fit the vast changes in the U.S. since the 1800s. Immigration reform needs to be framed in terms of those dramatic changes rather than the conditions that prevailed over a hundred years ago.
23. In looking for what has been called that “illusive middle ground” the beginning point always seems to be amnesty for those illegal aliens who are already here. That is not the middle ground --not even close!
24. We can determine who, among the millions of illegals, are essential to our economy and those who aren’t. That is the middle ground and that is where we should begin.
25. We can and should tie overall immigration quotas to the total U.S. unemployment rate by sector.. The real connection between the two cannot be denied. Immigration quotas should not be demand-driven.
26. Most of those who have studied immigration have failed to address the issue of uncontrolled population growth and its impact on our standard of living and quality of life. They provide very few facts about the ultimate sustainability of population-driven economic growth.
27. Illegal immigration is a serious criminal offense not a civil right. When compounded with fraudulent documents, it is a felony.
28. It’s time to end mass immigration. The flood of legal immigrants and illegal aliens drives wages and living conditions for those on the lowest economic rung toward those of the Third World. The influx imposes both sprawl and gridlock on our metropolitan areas.
29. Immigrant families needing services overwhelm our schools, taxpayer-funded health care facilities and other public agencies. Those requiring services don't assimilate and, instead, expect to be served in their native languages. American civic culture frays as each ethnic group establishes its own grievance lobby and pushes for preferences.
30. Lack of reform is yet another illustration of an all too common American mindset: short on vision, mired in denial and unable to comprehend nature’s limits.
No comments:
Post a Comment