🇺🇸👍🏼🗽😇THE FUTURE WILL BELONG TO NATIONS THAT WELCOME IMMIGRANTS: Getting Rid of Trump, Miller, Cotton, & The Other GOP Racist Restrictionists Is A Key First Step To A Better America For All!

https://apple.news/ApxPyJV3cSBOtEU7c4Xlk4A

Frida Ghitis @ CNN:

The only way the United States can remain the world’s most prosperous, powerful country is by embracing immigration. That’s the inescapable conclusion from a new study published on Tuesday in the Lancet that predicts the world’s population will peak far sooner than anticipated, and start shrinking before the end of this century.

There is, however, no guarantee that the US will embrace immigration, even to save itself. Domestic politics, currently inflamed by divisive nativist leaders, have turned immigration into a contested topic. A country that rose to historic heights of influence and prosperity by welcoming immigrants, is now led by a President who has weaponized the issue with unfathomable cruelty.

One example: At this moment, hundreds of migrant families held in detention facilities face the wrenching choice of whether to let their children be released to third parties, or stay together in detention. This awful decision comes as the result of court order last month that called for the children’s release in light of the coronavirus pandemic — and it is essentially a new version of the family separation policy that tore apart thousands of children from their parents earlier in the Trump administration.

Such heartless political measures flout America’s founding principles — but are also out of step with public opinion on immigration: an overwhelming majority of Americans — 77%, according to a recent 2020 Gallup poll- say it is good for the country. The prospect of falling birth rates predicted by study — from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine — may be a thumb on the scale in favor of more immigration. After all, businesses will need workers. Even the military will likely feel the pressure of contracting numbers of people of military age.

The new study shows how far off the mark earlier assumptions about exploding population growth fell. Some among you, my dear readers, may remember when intellectuals were gripped by the fear of a “Malthusian catastrophe,” fear that population growth would outpace our ability to feed ourselves. But it turns out that Thomas Robert Malthus, the 18th century economist and demographer, got it all wrong.

Not only did agricultural advances undercut his thesis, it turns out the world’s population will start contracting before long, with powerful economic, geopolitical and environmental implications.

. . . .

The result will be increased friction over immigration, with the arguments of immigration advocates bolstered by demographers, economists and a business community anxious to see consumption increase and workers available.

The present may be blazing with the demagogues’ sturm und drang about keeping immigrants out. But the future belongs to the country that welcomes them.

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Read the complete article at the link.

Immigration is both an unstoppable human force and good for America. The sooner we end the current regime’s cruel and stupid White Nationalist policies and develop a robust, thoughtful, inclusive, realistic approach to legal immigration (including refugees), the better off we will be as a nation.

An immediate benefit would be a sharp reduction in the amount of resources and goodwill wasted on counterproductive and often both illegal and immoral restrictionist enforcement gimmicks. That would actually align immigration enforcement with the national interest, rather than undermining it as is now the case with many of the misguided enforcement efforts, particularly “civil” imprisonment and deportations of refugees and long time residents.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

07-17-20

U.S. CENSUS BUREAU CONFIRMS WHAT MANY OF US ALREADY KNOW: Trump Regime’s White Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant Policies Are As Stupid & Counterproductive As They Are Vile!

Marissa J. Lang
Marissa J. Lang
Local Reporter
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/us-population-will-decline-faster-without-steady-immigration-census-report-says/2020/02/13/1ccff6d6-4ea7-11ea-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html

By

Marissa J. Lang

Feb. 13, 2020 at 8:15 p.m. EST

Limiting immigration over the next four decades would do little to stop the racial diversification of the United States — but it could push the country into a population decline, according to a new report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

For the first time in a decade, the federal agency gamed out how varying degrees of immigration could impact the U.S. population in terms of growth, age and racial diversity and its labor force.

Its conclusions, experts said, underscore the important role immigrants play in keeping the U.S. population trending upward.

“We desperately need immigration to keep our country growing and prosperous,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the Census numbers this week. “The reason we have a good growth rate in comparison to other developed countries in the world is because we’ve had robust immigration for the last 30 to 40 years.”

Virginia poised to help undocumented immigrants get driver’s licenses

The Census compared population estimates based on immigration levels from 2011 to 2015 and ran several “what if” scenarios to see how changing the flow of immigrants could impact the population as a whole.

Analysts compared the status quo with a “high immigration” scenario in which immigration would increase by about 50 percent; a “low immigration” scenario in which immigration would decline by about 50 percent; and a “zero immigration” scenario that demonstrates what would happen if immigration ground to a complete stop.

Immigration fluctuations between now and 2060 could make the difference of as many as 127 million people in the U.S. population, the Census found.

If immigration declines by 50 percent, the United States would still add about 53 million people over the next four decades, the report says.

But if immigration is stopped altogether, the population would stall out in 2035, after which it would slide into a decline. By 2060, under a zero-immigration scenario, the Census found the population could reach a low of 320 million people with a large and rapidly aging senior population.

The population of American seniors — aged 65 and older — is expected to surpass the population of children under the age of 18 in every scenario, though higher immigration patterns would delay the inevitable: In the zero-immigration plot, seniors outpace children by the year 2029; in the high-immigration pattern, seniors don’t overtake children until 2045.

Immigration has, of course, been shaped by the policies and rhetoric of President Trump, whose rise to power in 2016 and subsequent immigration policies are not accounted for in the Census report.

Last month, the president added six countries to his administration’s travel ban list, which already prohibited nearly all citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea from immigrating to the United States.

The new ban, which takes effect on Feb. 22, would bar immigrants from Nigeria — Africa’s most populous country — as well as Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan. It would also prevent people from Tanzania and Sudan from applying for the visa lottery, which issues up to 50,000 visas annually to countries with historically low migration to the United States.

Nigerian official expressed confidence country will be dropped from U.S. travel-ban list

Most of the people affected by the policy hail from predominantly black and Muslim nations, a fact that has prompted Democrats and other critics to call the ban an exercise in racism and xenophobia.

But according to census data, eliminating all forms of immigration altogether would not prevent the United States from becoming increasingly nonwhite.

“The fastest-growing racial group in this country is people who identify as multiracial,” Frey said.

Without any new immigrants coming to the United States, the non-Hispanic white population would still fall by about 17 percent over the next four decades, the Census reports. That means that by 2060, white people would make up just barely more than half of the country — 51 percent, with that number expected to decline further in the future.

In all other scenarios, the United States is projected to become majority-minority well before then: by 2041, if immigration increases; by 2045, if immigration remains constant; and by 2049, if immigration is cut in half.

Among young people below age 30, the change is more rapid, and is expected to tip the scales in this decade.

“You could stop immigration tomorrow, and this country would still become more racially diverse,” Frey said.

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It would make more sense if we had a thoughtful, honest Government that worked to achieve the full potential of inevitable immigration rather than fighting a costly, rancorous, counterproductive, and ultimately fruitless “war” against that which made America great in the first place.

The latest regime “scam on America:” sending “elite Border Patrol Tactical Squads” (who obviously lack any real, meaningful law enforcement assignment) to “sanctuary cities” to round up more undocumented individuals to aimlessly throw into a failing and mismanaged “court” system that’s already backed up for years. There has to be a more intelligent and efficient way to prioritize and conduct immigration enforcement.

“We can diminish ourselves as a nation (and are in the process of doing that on many fronts), but it won’t stop human migration.”

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-15-20

 

WASHPOST EDITORIAL: HOW THE TRUMP REGIME’S NATIVIST IMMIGRATION AGENDA ENDANGERS AMERICA’S FUTURE – “But the fact that starting a new life in the United States has come to seem less attractive, both to prospective parents already living here and to prospective arrivals from abroad, is a warning this country cannot afford to ignore.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americans-dip-in-population-growth-is-a-warning-we-shouldnt-ignore/2020/01/03/4f65d1c0-2d90-11ea-bcd4-24597950008f_story.html

 

The Post’s View

Opinion

American’s dip in population growth is a warning

By Editorial Board

Jan. 4, 2020 at 1:58 p.m. EST

 

Like all social change, population growth has costs (increased use of limited resources) and benefits (fresh ideas, more people to do necessary work). On the whole, history — both global and American — refutes the Malthusian belief that more people means more misery. To the contrary, a growing labor force is one factor that determines an economy’s capacity to grow. On that basis alone, it would be concerning that the Census Bureau has released new data showing that the U.S. population grew only 6.7 percent in the past decade, which is the slowest 10-year rate since the census began in 1790. Add that all living members of the baby boom generation will have turned 65 by 2030 — and that 18 percent of the nation will be at least that age, according to Pew Research Center population projections — and demographic stagnation begins to seem uncomfortably realistic.

 

The good news is that, even at reduced rates of growth, the U.S. population, 328.2 million, is still expanding more rapidly than populations of peer nations such as Japan (whose population of 126 million is actually shrinking). The bad news, though, is that both sources of the U.S. edge in population dynamism — a relatively strong birthrate and immigration — are implicated in the Census Bureau’s report. Net international migration — permanent moves to the United States minus permanent departures — was 595,348 between 2018 and 2019. In 2016, by contrast, the figure was 1,046,709. The Census Bureau and other experts have yet to identify a specific cause, but it’s certainly plausible to link the decline to the anti-immigration posture adopted by President Trump during that interval.

Meanwhile, the natural increase in the population between 2018 and 2019 — births minus deaths — was 956,674, the first reading under 1 million in “decades,” according to the Census Bureau. As of 2018, the United States’ total fertility ratestood at 1,728 births per 1,000 women over their lifetimes, well below the replacement rate of 2,100 births per 1,000 women. The causes are unknown, though there may be a continued hangover from the economic uncertainty of the Great Recession.

Unchecked, these trends may mean less economic growth and a diminished support base for a large retired cohort. Boosting birthrates, to be sure, is notoriously difficult, as a number of European countries and Japan have already discovered. Of course, compared with those other countries, the United States has done little to provide paid family leave or subsidized child care — and could do more.

Boosting immigration, by contrast, is relatively easy to accomplish. Or it would be, if the president and many in his party were not engaged in a simplistic campaign to demonize it, one result of which has been to slash refu­gee admissions from 85,000 in fiscal 2016 to 30,000 in fiscal 2019. Immigration should come through legal channels and be more closely tailored to fit labor force needs. But the need for more of it is real.

The recent dip in population growth need not prove irreversible. But the fact that starting a new life in the United States has come to seem less attractive, both to prospective parents already living here and to prospective arrivals from abroad, is a warning this country cannot afford to ignore.

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Not surprisingly, largely fact-free policy making based on a White Nationalist agenda and the myths about immigrants it necessarily generates will contravene the national interests in many ways while serving the narrow political and sociological interests of a vocal and motivated minority.

 

PWS

01-06-19