Confession being good for the soul, I confess that I barely followed the controversy about making war on Iraq; that after the first day or two I followed the fighting for a few minutes a day, and have given it about two minutes daily ever since. Nor have I cluttered my mind with the recriminations about the non-discovery of weapons of mass destruction or whether Bush lied us into war.
Why should I? Compared to our real problems, Iraq is a trifle.
While pundits speculate on whether Saddam Hussein is still alive, multiple catastrophes are unfolding at home. To name a few: The federal budget is plunging into red ink. Entitlement and health care costs are exploding, and will soon become unaffordable as aging baby boomers flood Medicare and Medicaid. Like quacks bleeding a hemophiliac, our dunderhead politicians want to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. The Social Security time bomb ticks toward explosion -and our "leaders" want to worsen the coming blast with a "totalization" i.e. subsidy agreement with Mexico. The natural gas crisis emphasizes that our way of life depends rapidly depleting fossil fuels. And the Jacobin left's holy war of hate against white people grinds relentlessly on.
And one of our worst problems is immigration.
We are drowning in immigrants. According to the Census Bureau's March 2002 Current Population Survey,[PDF] 1.5 million immigrants arrive each year. This works out to 4,110 immigrants every day, 171 an hour, three a minute (2.85 for those of you who like precise figures), one every 21 seconds. There are 750,000 births to immigrant women a year: 2,055 a day, 86 an hour, one every 42 seconds. Our annual population growth from immigration, then, is 2.25 million, over two-thirds of total annual population growth of about 3.3 million, which is 1.2 percent of our 2002 population of 282 million. At this rate, America's population will double in 59 years.
Immigration is exacerbating just about every other problem we have.
The economic argument for immigration is a self-serving lie. Immigration enthusiasts brag that immigration holds inflation down. They appear to mean that it increases the labor supply and causes wages to stagnate. Great. But immigrants also increase the demand for services, pushing up their cost. They use maternity wards and emergency rooms without paying for them. Hospitals push the costs onto Americans, whose health insurance premiums rise accordingly. So immigration squeezes American workers at both ends: worsening the health care crisis and driving up the cost of living while making labor incomes stagnate. The only Americans who benefit are immigration lawyers, vote-hungry politicians, and employers of cheap labor.
Immigration adds demographic clout to militant Islamic and Hispanic Fifth Columns. The huge influx of people to whom our European heritage is alien is breaking up our political and cultural cohesion; the celebration of Columbus Day has become controversial; Christmas is becoming a de-Christianized "holiday season." Immigration provides a handy rationalization for multiculturalist agendas such as diversity, affirmative action and the stigmatization and dispossession of whites. Immigration plus political correctness is a witch's brew of mischief and malefaction. Can you say "Balkanized"? How about "conquered"?
Ecologically, immigration spells catastrophe. Immigration is the major force driving our exploding population growth. It chronically strains our supply of housing, infrastructure, and public goods. We are forced to develop huge amounts of rural real estate to provide these things for the additional millions. And more people not only use more resources, but generate more pollution. Immigration will wreck America's environment as surely as breakneck economic growth is wrecking China's.
One of the most important concepts in ecology is "carrying capacity": the maximum population of a species which a habitat can sustain indefinitely. Signs are everywhere that America is not only populated far beyond carrying capacity, but is actually reducing it: the drawdown of aquifers faster than they are being recharged; recurring droughts and water shortages; our collapsing oil output (most American wells now pump ten barrels or less a day); the accelerating depletion of natural gas wells; our dependence on imports of oil and natural gas; widespread soil erosion and salinization. Since immigration is driving our population growth, it is also driving this ruinous trend.
Not only is immigration an economic, political, and cultural disaster, then, but the immigration-driven population explosion is wrecking America's ecosystem. And then what? Can you say "die-off?"
I couldn't care less about Saddam and his "weapons of mass destruction." But I care plenty about losing the Southwest to militant Mexicans. I care that the ranchers along the border aren't safe in their own homes. I care that the population boom is turning America into a human anthill. I don't want my little niece and nephew (and my still-hypothetical wife and children, if God's that good to me) members of a persecuted white minority dwelling in a Balkanized nation of depleted aquifers, ruined soil, and scarce energy, in an overloaded land lurching toward depopulation.
Immigration is far more of a threat to my country and everything I cherish than Saddam Hussein ever was. I don't care whether Bush was right about the war, either. This amnesty-seeking, pandering pol is as wrong as two left shoes about immigration. And that's the issue that matters.
Forget Iraq. Stop immigration—now.
John Attarian [email him] is an independent scholar and writer with a doctorate in economics living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the author of Economism and the National Prospect (American Immigration Control Foundation, 2001), Social Security: False Consciousness and Crisis (Transaction Publishers), and Immigration: Wrong Answer for Social Security (American Immigration Control Press, 2003).
