From my experience as a child of good parents and as a professional educator, I learned to recognize the qualities of a good parent. A good parent sets up reasonable rules, makes sure they are clearly understood and enforces them without abuse. A good parent does not spoil their child by letting them have their way, only to yell at them when they misbehave. A good parent does not create chaos by allowing those in their charge to have a free reign. A good parent looks into the future and tries to prepare those in their care with a skill set dialed into the future they are likely to face.
That is the way we need to think about immigration policy for the US going forward. We are not a nation that needs any more hate or unfair rules thrown at the newest members of our society. But in our overpopulated world we need to set an example of how to scale down our numbers which are eating away at our country’s vitality.
We must set and enforce limits and do so in the way that a good parent does, with tough love. We need to think of our country as a house and admit that our house has limits. The US operates according to a narrative about being a democratic nation of immigrants, but that is a story predicated on often unrecognized ecological and structural limits. Measure the emptying reservoirs, the constant traffic jams, the disappearing wild animals, or the overtaxed healthcare system and the damaging effects of adding too much demand to limited resources becomes obvious. By most measures, the US has reached many of its limits in both natural and structural resources. Adding more demand stresses those resources creating a world where squalor will dominate.
We need to recognize that setting up responsible immigration laws and enforcing them is both critical and compassionate for our future. America needs to be a good parent, beginning with an assessment of our resources, and pointing both a critical and legal finger at those businesses set out to prey on new immigrants with low wages, and efforts to stop unions. Mass immigration has been encouraged throughout our history so that businesses make profits while taking advantage of their desperation. As a result, African Americans became disenfranchised once again, for many industries have a sordid track record of preferring immigrants over those for whom we still owe access to a decent American livelihood. This shameful history is well documented in Roy Beck’s 2020 book, Back of the Hiring Line, A 200-Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, and Depression of Black Wealth.
Saying that we love our immigrants but ignoring tools like E-verify to check on work authorization before hiring, is like saying you love your child by telling them to wear a helmet but not checking if they bother to wear one. Allowing for more open chain migration to ever distant family members, is like telling a child that they can invite however many kids they want to their birthday party so that they don’t hurt their feelings, without checking if there is enough cake to go around.
This will all fall on deaf ears, of course, because few realize how seriously overpopulated the US is relative to its resources and quality of life. Our media and politicians don’t tell the story that we just don’t have much to share with more newcomers. We have added 181 million people within our borders since I was born in the 50’s. Our outrageous population of 332,000,000 people is putting a pressure on everything from our dying rivers to our collapsing freeway infrastructure. Continuing to ignore our numbers is like watching smoke billow out from under our windows without calling the fire department.
We pay attention to almost every threat to American life except overpopulation. We can’t turn on the news without hearing about the latest variant or violent storms caused by climate change. We must require of all news services and all of our conservation organizations to use the word overpopulation instead of euphemisms like habitat loss and overcrowding so that Americans will see that being a good parent means realizing we are overshooting our country’s ability to provide water, food and a decent life to those already here.
Deliberately taking on more people when you are already overpopulated is being a bad parent. It’s like allowing the bathtub to overflow and wondering why you are spending your time constantly mopping up the floor. Turning off the faucet is a responsible act in a country which keeps growing in spite of lowered birth rates and a pandemic. Our growth now and increasingly into the future, will be due to unregulated and unenforced immigration policies, unless we wake up and become the good parent.
We all know of someone who desperately wants to come to the US for a variety of understandable reasons. That makes it very difficult to be the good parent we need to be and say no. It makes it difficult to be in favor of reigning in the number of visas doled out by the government, just like it’s difficult to look into a child’s begging eyes and explain to them that they must limit their candy intake. Saying yes to unlimited candy now means cavities and diabetes will soon be lurking on the horizon.
We can probably all remember a time when our parent’s said “no” when we thought we knew better. We thought we had a handle on our maturity and ability to handle things when clearly we did not. Now America needs to be a good parent and fairly limit immigration in creative un-demeaning ways that allow for well vetted, enforceable temporary stays in a house that has run out of room.