Walter Ewing /IPC: massive immigration is great! (note: assumes we're a completely different country and more like Europe)

The Immigration Policy Center offers a mini-study (written by Walter Ewing) called "Fuzzy Math: The Anti-Immigration Arguments of NumbersUSA Don’t Add Up" (http://immigrationpolicy.org/index.php?content=fc060209):

According to the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, immigration to the United States is all about arithmetic: immigration increases the U.S. population, and more people presumably means more pollution, more urban sprawl, more competition for jobs, and higher taxes for Americans who must shoulder the costs of “over-population.”1 At first glance, this argument is attractive in its simplicity: less immigration, fewer people, a better environment, more jobs, lower taxes. However, as with so many simple arguments about complex topics, it is fundamentally flawed and misses the point. “Over-population” is not the primary cause of the environmental or economic woes facing the United States, so arbitrary restrictions on immigration will not create a cleaner environment or a healthier economy.

Ewing goes on to describe all the ways that massive immigration wouldn't impact the environment. To summarize, we'd have to transform ourselves into Sweden in order to reduce or minimize the impact. Ewing doesn't even slightly acknowledge that, no, we aren't Western Europe. According to him, "[t]he problem is less about how many people are in the United States, and more about how the United States produces and consumes". Yet, he and the IPC aren't requiring a coupling between massive immigration and different building and environmental policies; they aren't saying that massive immigration should be possible once we're all green. Their position is irresponsible, encouraging massive immigration into a society that's at most very lightly green. They're basically acknowledging NumbersUSA's point and providing a fantastical way in which NumbersUSA's concerns would be mitigated.

Eweing also takes fault with an economic analysis NumbersUSA did; he may or may not have a point. However, he in turn doesn't work non-economic factors into his analysis, such as the huge cost of giving the Mexican government even more political power inside the U.S.

He also mentions the Rob Paral report discussed here and an older Giovanni Peri report; see this. Regarding chain migration, whatever both sides are claiming the fact remains that any form of comprehensive immigration reform would increase it greatly.

Tue, 06/02/2009 - 17:48 · · Importance: 4