Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Immigration Maximizes Global Population Growth


The rich use two methods to increase population.  First, they encourage or compel people to have more children than they can support, because you need an oversupply of labor to drive wages down.  When this is not possible, the rich use immigration from other lands to cancel out the effects of low domestic fertility rates.  It is not true that migration only moves people around: migration maximizes total world population.  Consider the potential population growth of China from 1800 to 1975.  This one country had the potential to export 37 billion people without any decrease in its own population!  When people are persuaded or forced to have enormous numbers of children, the resulting exponential growth can and does fill every space available.  A world without borders is a world whose population will soon be set by places like Bangladesh and Haiti. 

There are many examples of societies with high fertility rates that, when they were prevented from exporting their surplus population, had a fall in the fertility rate.  America at the closing of the frontier, and Japan and Western Europe at the end of WWII come to mind.  This demonstrates that preventing people from emigrating from a country with a high fertility rate can often lower the rate of population growth in that country.  If not, then sooner or later natural forces will cull the population by itself.  By fair means or foul, limiting the emigration of people from societies with high fertility rates does indeed limit global population growth, and vice-versa.

The idea that migration does not grow net global population is not only false, it is usually irrelevant.  As far as a specific country is concerned, if immigration causes a net population increase, then the economic effect is exactly the same as if the fertility rate had been increased.  When large numbers of immigrants enter a country, the advocates of this forced population growth often (falsely) intone that migration does not increase total population, but only moves it around.  And of what relevance is this possibility to those crushed into poverty by a sudden increase in the number of people competing for jobs?  None at all.

The propagandists defending the importation of large numbers of foreigners to drive down wages often couch their arguments in terms of morality.  The idea is that the people living in a rich country have no right to deny refugees from poorer countries the ability to move in with them, even if it costs them their standard of living: we must sacrifice to help others poorer than ourselves.  However, almost without exception the advocates of this sacrifice have no intention of making any sacrifice themselves.  Indeed, they stand to make enormous profits.  The wealthy advocates of sacrifice would be deeply insulted if you suggested that they share in the sacrifice they so piously urge on others, but you won’t be able to make this suggestion because people like you are not allowed to talk back to their betters.  Note also the aggressiveness with which the rich defend their own walled estates and private country clubs from trespassers.   “There shall be open borders” is only for little people.  Any argument about having to accept large numbers of foreigners into a country made by such wealthy hypocrites must be rejected with prejudice.  Let the rich practice what they preach and we’ll discuss morality.  But not before.

Saying that you want to import foreign nationals in vast numbers in order to create widespread poverty so you can make a quick buck does not sound very attractive.  So the rich don’t say it.  Instead they claim they are ‘celebrating diversity’ or creating ‘multiculturalism’.  What rot.  Follow the money: it’s ALL about the numbers.  Therefore the rich will always try to avoid talking about the numbers, and to make the debate entirely about the nature of the foreigners themselves.  They will shift the debate away from how many foreign nationals a country should admit in the next year, to a discussion of the personal worth of citizens who happen to be immigrants vs. those who are native born.  This lets the rich make it personal, it helps them divide the population against itself, and lets them slander any opponent of forced population growth as a racist.  Don’t let them.  Instead of debating whether it is good or bad that the United States should be majority ethnic Latin American and Asian by 2040, you should be debating why the United States needs to increase its population to a half billion and beyond.  If someone tries to get you to admit that your opposition to forced population growth is not motivated by racism, it is suggested that you counter by asking if they are still beating their children, and that if they are going to ask sleazy questions, turnabout is fair play.

When the rich use immigration to maximize population growth, this requires an all-encompassing propaganda campaign to defuse the natural opposition of the people at the receiving end of all these surplus people.  This in turn requires convincing people that too-rapid population growth is not a problem (or at least intimidating people into remaining silent), and this affects the entire world in that it prevents an honest discussion of the issues and allows the oligarchies in other societies to increase the primary fertility rate without opposition.  This distortion and corruption of public debate about population growth may be the single most harmful aspect of using immigration to force population growth.  Because demographics is central to so many aspects of economics and environmental issues, the Orwellian elimination of its mention causes distortions of radical and far-ranging import.  Imagine if you were to eliminate any reference to the law of gravity from the fields of engineering and physics: the result would be almost incoherent.

The people living in a country have the perfect right to regulate how many people they let in, the same as a rich person has the right to restrict who may enter his or her house or country club or business.   It is sometimes said that a country needs to have an open-borders immigration policy in order to attract the best talent, but this is opposite to reality.  The immigration policy that gave the United States people like Einstein, Fermi and Szilard was a restrictive one, that used a high standard of living to attract the best and brightest from around the world, while limiting the total numbers to levels that did not drive down wages or increase crowding.  If you completely open the borders a country will eventually lose the ability to attract the best people: Einsteins never move to miserably poor countries, they move to rich countries.

A moderate and practical restrictionist immigration policy is anathema to the lovers of cheap labor.  In their view working people are cattle, and if the rich want to increase their profits by jamming in more cattle then the cattle should have no say in the matter.  How dare the average person have any input into how many people there shall be!  They must be racists.  Pass the champagne, dear, and make sure the guards close the gates after our invited guests have arrived.

In summary: yes, mass migration maximizes net global population growth.  When the rich take it upon themselves to move populations around, to replace a people with another people, to decide who gets to live where and how many, to cancel out the effects of low fertility rates in one place by importing the surplus from a place with a high fertility rate, then this is managing the human herd as surely as a farmer manages livestock.
If you do not want your descendants to live like cattle, you should object now while there is still time, humans.

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