This is a re-post from May 17, 2006, following Bush's speech on immigration:
Robert Samuelson's op-ed in today's Washington Post, almost alone among the commentary I have seen in recent days, takes a sober, rhetoric-free look at the long-term economic and social consequences of our nation's unwillingness to control how many and what sort of foreigners we choose to allow into the United States.
President Bush's immigration speech mostly missed the true nature of the problem. We face two interconnected population issues. One is aging; the other is immigration. We aren't dealing sensibly with either, and as a result we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict. On the one side will be older baby boomers demanding all their federal retirement benefits. On the other will be an expanding population of younger and poorer Hispanics -- immigrants, their children and grandchildren -- increasingly resentful of their rising taxes that subsidize often-wealthier and unrelated baby boomers.
Does this look like a harmonious future?
Such big-picture analysis of the demographic future of our country - which, unlike the price of oil, the value of the dollar, or the cost of buying a home, can be predicted with a reasonable degree of certainty - is virtually unknown among policymakers or journalists. Continuing, Samuelson argues that in focusing exclusively on illegal immigration, we have missed the forest for the trees:
The central problem is not illegal immigration. It is undesirably high levels of poor and low-skilled immigrants, whether legal or illegal, most of whom are Hispanic. Immigrants are not all the same. An engineer making $75,000 annually contributes more to the American economy and society than a $20,000 laborer. On average, the engineer will assimilate more easily.
This ought to be common sense, but such things are rarely if ever discussed honestly or forthrightly. The obsessive desire on the part of Bush and the Senate to flood this country with poor, uneducated, non-English speaking workers will have incalculable consequences down the road for virtually every area of American society, and Samuelson deserves credit for sounding the alarm.
