Immigration Must Have a Limit

Articles

Daniel J. Shanefield

Immigration Must Have a Limit
July 26, 2003

There’s got to be a limit, somewhere, to the population in the prosperous countries like Japan, the U.S. , and Europe. We’re using up too much water, too much space for waste disposal (ordinary as well as nuclear), too much of the limited resources like palladium (for automobile exhaust catalysts), etc. We can’t let multi- millions of people from the poor countries keep coming in, with no limit.

If we have too many old people, and not enough young people to support them, then our standard of living will just have to come down, as we get older. (Eventually, that will happen anyhow, because of limits to economic growth.) We might as well start planning for this, and try not to let it hit some people too much harder than others. We’ll just have to all get slightly poorer together --- hopefully, just slowly. Improved technology and “productivity” will slow the process.

We won’t have the influx of poor people to rake leaves, take away garbage, etc. at very low wages, so we’ll have to pay more, to get our own people to do those things. Thus we’ll have less money for luxuries. (Another limit to that influx is that hospitals, schools, and low cost housing are being overwhelmed right now, so it’s got to drastically slow down, soon.)

The very poor people in Latin America and Asia who want to come to our countries to work and get richer will have to stay home and get poorer. That will happen anyhow, for most of them, since overpopulation (and lack of water, etc.) is so fantastically intense and getting worse so fast. There is no way that our immigration rate can be the safety valve for their enormous population growth rates, no matter what we do. “Famine, war, and plague” will eventually limit the population, which is already starting in Africa, but we can’t stop that in the whole world --- we’d all just get killed trying.

We’ll have to spend more of our limited money growing our own food, defending ourselves, and keeping plagues away, so we had better start planning to do those things, and make sure we don’t lose the capabilities, even if it requires big subsidies here.

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About the author: Dan Shanefield is a Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University and formerly a Bell Labs engineer. Visit his website or email Dan: s@ieee.org

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