Mainers For Responsible Immigration

The lead story in NYTimes.com:

Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as Over 76,000 Migrants Cross in a Month

For the fourth time in five months, the number of migrant families crossing the southwest border has broken records, the authorities said.

They warned that government facilities were full and that agents were overwhelmed…

Let’s do some math: 76,000/month, x 12 months/year = 912,000 per year. No problemo!

In 1969, fifty years ago, after a forty year moratorium on immigration, the United States sent men to land on the moon. The nation had 100 million fewer people, and still had the human capital to achieve what has not been accomplished since. We don’t need to import more people. We have all the smart people we need, and all the poor people we can handle.

America was a wonderful country to live in back then. Fifty years of mass immigration have made it more congested, more rancorous, and incapable of even modest human achievement. Perhaps, it is time to acknowledge that continued immigration will only make our problems of environmental degradation, social conflict, shabby and strained infrastructure, and massive public debt even worse.

(China has landed a probe on the far-side of the moon and built stunning high-speed rails across their vast nation. What are their immigration policies?)

A commenter on a popular blog pointed out how mass immigration exacerbates all the problems people should really be concerned about:

In fairness, it’s not just environmentalism, basically *everything* the left claims to value is under assualt by mass immigration:

— jobs, good wages, income equality, good schools, affordable housing, community, races relations, gender equality, LBQWERTY, a generous welfare state, reigning in sprawl, public transit use, walkable neighborhoods, open spaces, habitat preservation, species preservation, limiting CO2 emissions…basically everything but “diversity”

The environment, sustainability, income equality, crime, crowding… Yet all those concerns are ignored in advocacy of bringing in millions of people to settle in our land every year. Weird.

The last Sunday’s Portland Press Herald featured an editorial criticizing Governor Lepage’s comments about national media stories discussing Portland’s struggle with people taking advantage of America’s foolishly generous laws for asylum and refugees. The editorial highlights the romanticism which many people view immigration.  It posits that immigrants who don’t speak English and have a lot of children will generate economic growth.  Like in Bangladesh, the Central African Republic or Guatemala, perhaps?  It laments the tight housing market and strain on public services, but does not make the connection between an influx of fecund migrants and the demand for shelter and welfare.  Governor Lepage, whatever his faults, was clear about the responsibility of government primarily to the economic, social and environmental welfare of Maine citizens.  And he carefully managed the state’s resources to that end.  He was skeptical of the effects of settling people who, as the editorial acknowledges, need “housing assistance, food pantries, and English classes” just to eke out a living.  Governor Lepage is wise to advocate the reduction in the influx of poor migrants who must struggle to make ends meet and assimilate.  The only rejoinder to his wisdom seems to be a dreamy naivety that immigration is an unalloyed good, and however much of it we have, more is better, and our problems are unrelated to 75% of Portland population growth being from immigration. 

The mantra of capitalists is “Growth!” It is an insatiable appetite for More. More profits, more consumers, more power. This unseemly greed is prettied-up in humanitarian terms to advocate for mass-immigration, but one should always follow the money to uncover the truth. The refugee racket is largely driven by the profit realized by Refugee Resettlement NGOs in the form of government grants. Business owners who keen on and on about how they can’t find workers are really just sustaining their business model on cheap labor. Politicians and bureaucrats extolling the virtues of mass immigration are simply building a bigger and more beholden clientele.

For most citizens of Maine, this ceaseless drive for More means More congestion, More work for less pay, More social rancor and destruction of a sense of community, stability and harmony.

To the capitalist, politicians, bureaucrats and bishops, we are like sardines: The more in the can, the better. Nobody asks the sardines how they feel about it.

As the benevolent, generous and trusting nature of Maine citizens is leveraged by advocates of mass immigration of skilled and unskilled labor to provide cheap labor for owners of capital, large and small, those advocates and their spokesmen often reference the Christian scriptures.

Setting aside doubts of the sincerity of the advocates’ devotion to the teachings of Christ, Edward Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) provides wise counsel to inform policy: “A doctrine [Christianity] so extraordinary and sublime must inevitably command the veneration of the people; but is ill calculated to obtain the suffrage of those worldly philosophers, who, in the conduct of this transitory life, consult only the feelings of nature and the interest of society”.

Or in simpler words: “Do not immanentize the eschaton”.

Discussions of immigration seem to distill to one side discussing the long term practical implications of mass immigration (lower wages, environmental degradation, social conflict…) and the other moralizing about uplifting the down-trodden, helping the disadvantaged, and celebrating diversity.

Is immigration a public policy, or is it a moral imperative?

The rap is that the wall won’t work and the wall is immoral. If it won’t work, why is it immoral? Objective evidence, from Hungary and Israel shows that the wall will work. Recent crimes by immigrants, legal and illegal, demonstrate the moral imperative of anything that helps reduce in influx of criminal aliens.

Frontpage Magazine has an extensive investigative essay on how the careless magnanimity of Portland’s voters and elected officials has invited an inflow of people seeking to indulge in the generous benefits on offer.