An Alabama Ph.D. Says Immigrants Are A problem Regardless Of Skill Levels

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12/04/09 - An Ohio Reader Says Obama, Pelosi, Reid, etc. Need To Read The Tenth Amendment

From: James Edward Stevens (e-mail him)

Re: Linda Thom's Column: Why Is California Burning? Because It's Importing Poverty

With all due respect to Thom, it's a mistake to emphasize that the problem with immigration is that the immigrants are poor.

In the long run, poverty has no bearing on anything. The real concern is that there are so many immigrants who are all arriving too quickly.

People, including immigrants, can only be productive if they have abundant materials and tools.

Their educational level doesn't change this. A billion people naked on an empty desert will starve no matter if they are illiterate or all have PhDs in computer science.

Education is not magic trick, and the United States per-capita capital needed to support the American standard of living is simply massive. There's no room to expand it to accommodate any population increases.

If we already have too many (for example) scientists and engineers, importing more will not magically create more jobs for scientists and engineers, it will simply drive down the skilled wages of workers already in that field

Proof: all those skilled engineers in India are not automatically creating new opportunities to such an extent that wages are rising to European levels.

Instead Indian wages remain abysmally low. Increasing the numbers of skilled workers does not automatically generate new opportunities any more than it would for unskilled people.

I don't mean to nit-pick Thom, but the issue of skill as it relates to immigration is a red herring.

The rich and powerful are perfectly happy to have massive immigration of skilled immigrants.

If that pattern continued unchecked, what it would eventually mean is that instead of illiterate immigrants picking lettuce at $2 an hour, we would have underemployed immigrants and native-born Americans doing stoop labor for $2 an hour.

That's not much of an improvement in the American quality of life.

Stevens has degrees from elite east coast universities. He is currently teaching and doing research in fields related to electrical engineering.

Linda Thom replies: Stevens is correct that overpopulation is a major American problem. But importing poor, uneducated people is particularly problematical.

My column's focus was to explain California's financial crisis. People with no education are a particular burden because they are a drain on public coffers at a time when the U.S. has millions of its own citizens to take care of.

Sadly, too, the children of uneducated parents generally do not do as well as children whose parents are better educated. Importing poor, uneducated aliens means the poverty cycle never ends.

Furthermore, poorly educated women have a higher fertility rate than educated women. Mexican women living in America (as American citizens) but born to Mexican mothers average three children per woman. Their fertility is the population driver.

The best thing that could happen to this country is to have an immigration moratorium because we do not need any more people. I have traveled extensively including to India and China  and the masses of people are oppressive. For my perspective of the population issue, you might like to look through the VDARE.COM archives for my tribute to the late Garrett Hardin.