Who is quite demanding, and wants me to intensively research immigration and debate him on the topic.
Sorry, I blog for fun, and hope that I write things that that are interesting to other people, but it’s not my day job. And it’s only vanity (that is, the desire to have blogspot’s comment count grow) that prevents me from just deleting these comments.
But I have yet to understand people who support open, unrestricted immigration, for a country such as the U.S. where, were there no restrictions, virtually the whole of Mexico, and large portions of China and other countries would immigrate here. Our country’s economy would simply collapse under the weight of a sudden increase in the population by a factor of two, or five, or ten, until the new immigrants have bid down their wages so low that their compatriots see what’s happened and stay at home where, on a purchasing-power-parity basis, their standard of living is better. And if you imagine that no one will work under the table, so everyone will be paid minimum wage, then we’re still looking at an explosion in the number of minimum wage workers, and massive demands on the educational and social services systems (e.g., families where the U.S.-born children are entitled to food stamps and Medicaid even if mom & dad aren’t).
Yes, the United States did, once upon a time, have open immigration. And we also had tenements and slums that make today’s inner-city projects look like castles, and 12-hour days and child labor and “How the Other Half Lives.”
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