0 comment Sunday, November 23, 2014 | admin
Steyn holds forth here on the absurdity of concerns about our growing population.
Lest some of his legion of fans accuse me of picking on Mark Steyn ('unfairly targeting' him, as the liberals always say when aggrieved) it is his very popularity, his icon-like status that is the problem; hee is hailed as a great sage, wit, seer, prophet, and the epitome of conservative wisdom. So he has enormous influence for many. His words are treated as gospel by many on the 'right'.
I will grant you that he is glib and witty, but his ideas are not sound, and when all is said and done, he gives the impression of shallowness when it comes to the important questions.
In this typically flippant piece, he is sneering at those who are concerned about the burgeoning American population. Last week we were treated to a week-long party by the MSM, ballyhooing the 300 millionth 'American.' The fact that we may have actually passed the 300 million milestone years ago, as Professor Virginia Abernethy says, is immaterial. The stories were all about getting us used to the idea that there is a surge in our population (who could fail to notice it? Crowded schools, crowded freeways, housing shortages, who could have guessed that our population is growing?) and that the increase is due mostly to immigration. And that 'immigration' is mostly of the illegal kind.
But no matter, say the cheerleaders, because we are becoming more 'diverse,'
However, notice that not once in Steyn's piece does he mention the word 'immigration'. Just to be sure that I was not missing it somewhere, I searched the page for the word 'immigration', and it was not found. How can Steyn, this supposed genius, miss that ponderous elephant in the national living room? One can only conclude that he is purposely avoiding looking at it.
Steyn asks instead why we are failing to celebrate the 300 million milestone. He answers his own question by saying that 'too many people who should know better' are peddling '40-year-old guff' about overpopulation. He then breezily adds,
America is the 172nd least densely populated country on Earth. If you think it's crowded here, try living in the Netherlands or Belgium, which have, respectively, 1,015 and 883 inhabitants per square mile compared with 80 folks per square mile in the United States. To be sure, somewhere such as, say, Newark, N.J., is a lot less bucolic than it was in 1798. But why is that? No doubt [Professor Dowell] Myers would say it's urban sprawl. But that's the point: you can only sprawl if you've got plenty of space.''
So: according to Steyn's logic, as long there are places that are much more densely populated than America, we can never legitimately say that America has too many people. So let's just keep packing 'em in, apparently.
He then goes on to crow about the affordability of housing in, oh, let's just say Crawford, Texas, giving us the news that
...a three-bedroom air-conditioned house in Crawford, Texas, could be yours for 30,000 bucks and, if that sounds a bit steep, a double-wide on a couple of acres would set you back about $6,000.''
Just to show how atypical Steyn's example is, this recent article says
The median price of a single-family home fell to $219,800 last month, a drop of 2.5 percent from the price in September 2005.''
According to City-Data.com the median house value in Crawford, at least in 2000, was $51,300.
So yes, it is possible to find a house in Crawford for the low price Steyn cites, but that is a low figure. And Crawford, Texas, is not typical; living expenses there are below the average.
Steyn, however, is not interested in making a real argument, but rather sneering at and dismissing those who think half a billion might be an undesirable population figure for America.
No one seriously thinks 400 or 500 million Americans will lead to mass starvation. By "unsustainable," they mean that we might encroach ever so slightly onto the West Nile mosquito's traditional breeding grounds in northern Maine. Which is sad if you think this or that insect is more important than the developed world's most critically endangered species: people. If you have a more scrupulous care for language, you'll note that population-wise it's low birth rates that are "unsustainable": Spain, Germany, Italy and most other European peoples literally cannot sustain themselves -- which is why, in one of the fastest demographic transformations in human history, their continent is becoming Muslim.'
Steyn offers no reasoning whatsoever as to why lower populations for Europe would render Europeans unable to sustain themselves. What, precisely, does Steyn think happened in past eras when the population was reduced drastically, with widespread plagues and pandemics, or warfare? In Europe, during the 5 years at the height of the Plague, 25 million people died. By some estimates this was half the population of Europe.
During WWII, Germany lost 7.5 million people, for example.
Whenever the population was reduced by some event like war or disease, there was social upheaval and dislocation, but somehow the people did sustain themselves. The countries did not vanish off the map, and the people did not become extinct. So I suspect when Steyn asserts that Europe cannot sustain itself without more population growth, what he actually means is that their present system, the welfare state which is entrenched across Europe, needs constant growth in order to keep up the pyramid scheme. More young workers are needed to take care of the older, retiring workers. Maybe the welfare state cannot continue without continuing, infinite growth, but can human societies count on perpetual growth? Come on, people; we live on a finite planet, with finite resources. And those 'conservatives' who jeer at such a plain, commonsense statement, are merely reacting in a knee-jerk fashion to what they have disdained as 'liberalism', 'tree-hugging', etc. It's more than unfortunate that conservatives have ceded the environmental issue to the left. If we conservatives are not concerned with conserving our resources and environment, as well as our quality of life, what good are we? It is not enviro-weenie-ism to want population growth to be within reasonable limits. And liberals are not wrong on everything; even a stopped clock is right twice a day, as the saying goes. Conservatism had better be about something more than just mindless automatic gainsaying of whatever the liberals/leftists say.
And here's another thought: maybe our country is big enough and wide-open enough to comfortably hold half a billion or more. But the fact is, the growth which we are experiencing now is happening too fast. What kind of 'conservative' applauds uncontrolled, precipitate growth, growth and change which are disruptive, disordered, and most of all, unnatural? If our population grows by natural means, that would be by increased family size; our own citizens reproducing at a more normal rate, rather than the depressed rate we have seen since the 1960s. If our population was growing by that method, we would be planning for it, anticipating the need for more schools, housing, infrastructure, jobs, etc. As it is, too much of our growth is by invasion, with even our government in the dark as to how many people are surreptitiously entering our country each and every day. The present growth in population is wildly uncontrolled, and the results are yet unknown. We can only extrapolate from present trends that there will be more of the same social dislocation and chaos that we are seeing: ethnic strife, increasing crime, resurgence of contagious diseases and pests (like bedbugs) Not to mention stresses on infrastructure, the need for more housing, prisons, schools, and the ever-increasing costs of social programs demanded by the immigrants, both legal and illegal.
Steyn refuses to deal with this aspect of the population question. He flatly asserts that an ever-growing population is an imperative, and that to meet this requirement, Europe is forced to admit millions of hostile Mohammedans. With Steyn and others like him, the choice is extinction or mass immigration of hostile third-worlders.
And there are many who seem to see the situation this way. I crossed swords in a debate once with a neocon blowhard who actually stated that 'We could bring the whole population of Mexico here and not be crowded; we could absorb all of Mexico, no problem!'
Whenever these blustering neocons want to discredit any concerns about population, they exhume the corpse of Thomas Malthus and give it a ritual drubbing. All they have to do, they believe, is sneer 'neo-Malthusians' and throw out a few insults against liberals and 'enviroweenies' and they have won, so they think. Unfortunately, their tactics often do work; the debate is then shut down, with their opponent labeled a 'liberal' 'envirowacko' or whatever.
But Malthus cannot be so easily dismissed. What he said was basic common sense: just as nature tends to be overprofuse in reproduction (as with plants and animals) so with human beings: if family size increases beyond the ability to feed and provide for the children, there will be poverty and hunger. We can see this in the Third World. Malthus's theories, so ridiculed by some 'conservatives', explain exactly why we are seeing mass immigration from the Third World: they continue to reproduce beyond the ability to feed and care for their offspring, and as a result, we in the West are being asked to carry them on our backs. At first, it was only a matter of humanitarian efforts to feed, clothe, and bring the Christian gospel to the starving people overseas, but now they are being dropped on our doorstep, like abandoned foundlings. And now we are responsible for them.
(This is reminiscent of the habits of the cowbird; but that's another story)
Malthus's theories have not been proven wrong by Steyn or anyone else. No, the world has not ended with a whimper -- yet, but maybe we have only been given a reprieve. The fact is, overpopulation is a problem in the rest of the world; it's only we Westerners who are the exception. The liberal Malthusians were wrong in this particular: they directed their 'zero population growth' efforts only at the developed (Western) countries, the countries best fit to take care of their offspring. However these liberal dogooders did little to discourage overreproduction in the backward Third World, and now their overflow is becoming our problem.
Given a choice between welcoming in a flood of hostile, incompatible people, who will change the West into something approaching the benighted countries they left behind, and being forced to adapt to a smaller population in our country, I would enthusiastically choose the latter. I have faith that our Western ingenuity, inventiveness, and can-do spirit could find a way to cope with smaller numbers. The Japanese are managing to keep their country functioning with lower birth rates, without welcoming in hordes of hostile strangers; they prize their culture and their people enough to shun that choice, and choose instead to use automation to compensate for a declining work force. To listen to Steyn and the other open borders neocons, we have no choice. We have to leave our doors open and see our country transformed and dismantled, or else perish helplessly.
I don't accept that false dilemma.
Lest some of his legion of fans accuse me of picking on Mark Steyn ('unfairly targeting' him, as the liberals always say when aggrieved) it is his very popularity, his icon-like status that is the problem; hee is hailed as a great sage, wit, seer, prophet, and the epitome of conservative wisdom. So he has enormous influence for many. His words are treated as gospel by many on the 'right'.
I will grant you that he is glib and witty, but his ideas are not sound, and when all is said and done, he gives the impression of shallowness when it comes to the important questions.
In this typically flippant piece, he is sneering at those who are concerned about the burgeoning American population. Last week we were treated to a week-long party by the MSM, ballyhooing the 300 millionth 'American.' The fact that we may have actually passed the 300 million milestone years ago, as Professor Virginia Abernethy says, is immaterial. The stories were all about getting us used to the idea that there is a surge in our population (who could fail to notice it? Crowded schools, crowded freeways, housing shortages, who could have guessed that our population is growing?) and that the increase is due mostly to immigration. And that 'immigration' is mostly of the illegal kind.
But no matter, say the cheerleaders, because we are becoming more 'diverse,'
However, notice that not once in Steyn's piece does he mention the word 'immigration'. Just to be sure that I was not missing it somewhere, I searched the page for the word 'immigration', and it was not found. How can Steyn, this supposed genius, miss that ponderous elephant in the national living room? One can only conclude that he is purposely avoiding looking at it.
Steyn asks instead why we are failing to celebrate the 300 million milestone. He answers his own question by saying that 'too many people who should know better' are peddling '40-year-old guff' about overpopulation. He then breezily adds,
America is the 172nd least densely populated country on Earth. If you think it's crowded here, try living in the Netherlands or Belgium, which have, respectively, 1,015 and 883 inhabitants per square mile compared with 80 folks per square mile in the United States. To be sure, somewhere such as, say, Newark, N.J., is a lot less bucolic than it was in 1798. But why is that? No doubt [Professor Dowell] Myers would say it's urban sprawl. But that's the point: you can only sprawl if you've got plenty of space.''
So: according to Steyn's logic, as long there are places that are much more densely populated than America, we can never legitimately say that America has too many people. So let's just keep packing 'em in, apparently.
He then goes on to crow about the affordability of housing in, oh, let's just say Crawford, Texas, giving us the news that
...a three-bedroom air-conditioned house in Crawford, Texas, could be yours for 30,000 bucks and, if that sounds a bit steep, a double-wide on a couple of acres would set you back about $6,000.''
Just to show how atypical Steyn's example is, this recent article says
The median price of a single-family home fell to $219,800 last month, a drop of 2.5 percent from the price in September 2005.''
According to City-Data.com the median house value in Crawford, at least in 2000, was $51,300.
So yes, it is possible to find a house in Crawford for the low price Steyn cites, but that is a low figure. And Crawford, Texas, is not typical; living expenses there are below the average.
Steyn, however, is not interested in making a real argument, but rather sneering at and dismissing those who think half a billion might be an undesirable population figure for America.
No one seriously thinks 400 or 500 million Americans will lead to mass starvation. By "unsustainable," they mean that we might encroach ever so slightly onto the West Nile mosquito's traditional breeding grounds in northern Maine. Which is sad if you think this or that insect is more important than the developed world's most critically endangered species: people. If you have a more scrupulous care for language, you'll note that population-wise it's low birth rates that are "unsustainable": Spain, Germany, Italy and most other European peoples literally cannot sustain themselves -- which is why, in one of the fastest demographic transformations in human history, their continent is becoming Muslim.'
Steyn offers no reasoning whatsoever as to why lower populations for Europe would render Europeans unable to sustain themselves. What, precisely, does Steyn think happened in past eras when the population was reduced drastically, with widespread plagues and pandemics, or warfare? In Europe, during the 5 years at the height of the Plague, 25 million people died. By some estimates this was half the population of Europe.
During WWII, Germany lost 7.5 million people, for example.
Whenever the population was reduced by some event like war or disease, there was social upheaval and dislocation, but somehow the people did sustain themselves. The countries did not vanish off the map, and the people did not become extinct. So I suspect when Steyn asserts that Europe cannot sustain itself without more population growth, what he actually means is that their present system, the welfare state which is entrenched across Europe, needs constant growth in order to keep up the pyramid scheme. More young workers are needed to take care of the older, retiring workers. Maybe the welfare state cannot continue without continuing, infinite growth, but can human societies count on perpetual growth? Come on, people; we live on a finite planet, with finite resources. And those 'conservatives' who jeer at such a plain, commonsense statement, are merely reacting in a knee-jerk fashion to what they have disdained as 'liberalism', 'tree-hugging', etc. It's more than unfortunate that conservatives have ceded the environmental issue to the left. If we conservatives are not concerned with conserving our resources and environment, as well as our quality of life, what good are we? It is not enviro-weenie-ism to want population growth to be within reasonable limits. And liberals are not wrong on everything; even a stopped clock is right twice a day, as the saying goes. Conservatism had better be about something more than just mindless automatic gainsaying of whatever the liberals/leftists say.
And here's another thought: maybe our country is big enough and wide-open enough to comfortably hold half a billion or more. But the fact is, the growth which we are experiencing now is happening too fast. What kind of 'conservative' applauds uncontrolled, precipitate growth, growth and change which are disruptive, disordered, and most of all, unnatural? If our population grows by natural means, that would be by increased family size; our own citizens reproducing at a more normal rate, rather than the depressed rate we have seen since the 1960s. If our population was growing by that method, we would be planning for it, anticipating the need for more schools, housing, infrastructure, jobs, etc. As it is, too much of our growth is by invasion, with even our government in the dark as to how many people are surreptitiously entering our country each and every day. The present growth in population is wildly uncontrolled, and the results are yet unknown. We can only extrapolate from present trends that there will be more of the same social dislocation and chaos that we are seeing: ethnic strife, increasing crime, resurgence of contagious diseases and pests (like bedbugs) Not to mention stresses on infrastructure, the need for more housing, prisons, schools, and the ever-increasing costs of social programs demanded by the immigrants, both legal and illegal.
Steyn refuses to deal with this aspect of the population question. He flatly asserts that an ever-growing population is an imperative, and that to meet this requirement, Europe is forced to admit millions of hostile Mohammedans. With Steyn and others like him, the choice is extinction or mass immigration of hostile third-worlders.
And there are many who seem to see the situation this way. I crossed swords in a debate once with a neocon blowhard who actually stated that 'We could bring the whole population of Mexico here and not be crowded; we could absorb all of Mexico, no problem!'
Whenever these blustering neocons want to discredit any concerns about population, they exhume the corpse of Thomas Malthus and give it a ritual drubbing. All they have to do, they believe, is sneer 'neo-Malthusians' and throw out a few insults against liberals and 'enviroweenies' and they have won, so they think. Unfortunately, their tactics often do work; the debate is then shut down, with their opponent labeled a 'liberal' 'envirowacko' or whatever.
But Malthus cannot be so easily dismissed. What he said was basic common sense: just as nature tends to be overprofuse in reproduction (as with plants and animals) so with human beings: if family size increases beyond the ability to feed and provide for the children, there will be poverty and hunger. We can see this in the Third World. Malthus's theories, so ridiculed by some 'conservatives', explain exactly why we are seeing mass immigration from the Third World: they continue to reproduce beyond the ability to feed and care for their offspring, and as a result, we in the West are being asked to carry them on our backs. At first, it was only a matter of humanitarian efforts to feed, clothe, and bring the Christian gospel to the starving people overseas, but now they are being dropped on our doorstep, like abandoned foundlings. And now we are responsible for them.
(This is reminiscent of the habits of the cowbird; but that's another story)
Malthus's theories have not been proven wrong by Steyn or anyone else. No, the world has not ended with a whimper -- yet, but maybe we have only been given a reprieve. The fact is, overpopulation is a problem in the rest of the world; it's only we Westerners who are the exception. The liberal Malthusians were wrong in this particular: they directed their 'zero population growth' efforts only at the developed (Western) countries, the countries best fit to take care of their offspring. However these liberal dogooders did little to discourage overreproduction in the backward Third World, and now their overflow is becoming our problem.
Given a choice between welcoming in a flood of hostile, incompatible people, who will change the West into something approaching the benighted countries they left behind, and being forced to adapt to a smaller population in our country, I would enthusiastically choose the latter. I have faith that our Western ingenuity, inventiveness, and can-do spirit could find a way to cope with smaller numbers. The Japanese are managing to keep their country functioning with lower birth rates, without welcoming in hordes of hostile strangers; they prize their culture and their people enough to shun that choice, and choose instead to use automation to compensate for a declining work force. To listen to Steyn and the other open borders neocons, we have no choice. We have to leave our doors open and see our country transformed and dismantled, or else perish helplessly.
I don't accept that false dilemma.
Labels: Population, Steyn
0 comment Thursday, November 20, 2014 | admin
According to Hispanic apologist Cindy Rodriguez of the Denver Post, we should welcome the invasion of our country because 'Latinas keep the population in balance.'
The most recent stats available show that in 2003 Latinas had an average of 2.79 babies, compared with 2.04 for women of Asian descent, 2.03 for African-American women and 1.85 for Caucasian women. (American Indians have even lower fertility rates.) Without Latinas, Haub said, the fertility rate in the U.S. would be lower than 2, just below the sustaining level. But average in Latinas, and the rate rises to 2.1 - the perfect balance. Their babies will enter the labor force in the next 15 years in time to offset the retirement of the first of the baby boomers.
Rodriguez loftily says that these facts are something that we Americans don't understand, because 'it's complicated' . Gee thanks, Cindy, for your confidence in the intelligence of us gringos. We can't understand this complicated fact that Latino birthrates are making up for the babies we slow-witted 'Anglos' aren't having.
Our elites keep telling us that Latinos are 'just doing the jobs Americans won't do,' so I guess Miss Cindy, in that vein, is telling us that the Latinas are 'just replacing the population that Americans won't replace.' And she is right in that white American birth rates (and American Indian birthrates) are lower. But Cindy, maybe you don't understand this because it's 'complicated. Look: our elites have been browbeating us since the 1950s to use contraception, to have fewer kids because there was, it seems, a 'population explosion.' So the pill was popularized, and abortion was legalized. And along came the feminists who shamed women for wanting to follow traditional roles, such as housewife and mother; these same feminists convinced women that they were slaves to domesticity, and that they could not be fulfilled unless they had a 'real' career, a paying job outside the home. Additionally, men were lured into the Hugh Hefner 'Playboy' philosophy of life, which saw marriage as a prison for men; Hefner glamorized the urge to be promiscuous and uncommitted to any one woman.
Add all this together, with constant warnings that overpopulation would destroy the world, and voila, lower birth rates. Yet who says that a constant increase in population is absolutely essential? What happened in earlier ages when plagues and epidemics and warfare wiped out large numbers of people? Did the human race vanish? It seems that birth rates have always fluctuated, so why assume that a constant increase is essential?
In time, maybe the Western first world countries would have awakened from their leftist delusions and returned to more normal fertility patterns. The idea that we have to transport millions upon millions of people from one country to another to 'balance' the population is some kind of modern madness; I think it is unprecedented in history, although Ms. Rodriguez seems to regard it as natural, and right as rain.
I also dislike how she smugly implies that the mass invasion of our country is somehow altruistically motivated; these Latina women are somehow giving birth to 'save' America. If this is not arrogance at its worst, I don't know what is.
As for providing a 'comfortable retirement' for gringo baby-boomers, I am not so optimistic that these Latino children she says are saviors of America will be interested in taking care of a generation of old Anglos, given the amount of hostility they are displaying towards Americans and our history. For an illustration of this hostility, check this quote, from Jose Angel Gutierrez, Professor of the University of Texas at Arlington:
We are migrants, free to travel the length and breadth of the Americas because we belong here. We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It's a matter of time. The explosion is in our population."
And from Augustin Cebada, of the 'Brown Berets':
We're here in Westwood, this is the fourth time we've been here in the last two months, to show white Anglo-Saxon Protestant L.A., the few of you who remain, that we are the majority, and we claim this land as ours, sit's always been ours, and we're still here, and none of the talk about deporting. If anyone's going to be deported it's going to be you! Go back to Simi Valley, you skunks! Go back to Woodland Hills! Go back to Boston! To back to the Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You're old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you, leave like beaten rats. You old white people, it is your duty to die. Even their own ethicists say that they should die, that they have a duty to die. They're taking up too much space, too much air. We are the majority in L.A.I know that the willfully blind among us 'gringos', who insist on pretending that we live in Mister Rogers Neighborhood, will dismiss those quotes as just the rantings of a 'tiny minority of extremists.' Fine; if denial helps you make it through these troubled times, then pretend. But there are more such quotes where those came from. Read and listen, if you are prepared for the hostility there.
But suppose we play the liberals' game, and assume that the Latino 'reconquista' is really just a lot of humble, hard-working 'folks' here to make a better life. Fine; we'll assume that, if you insist. But let's look at the issue of population.
Contrary to what some stubborn conservatives say, there was something to the argument that unlimited population growth is a danger. Many conservatives sneer at those they call 'neo-Malthusians' who argue for population control.
Yet even they can't deny that our country is experiencing strains on resources due mostly to immigration. There is a serious water supply problem in many areas of the Southwest, the area which has seen the most growth due to the influx of illegals. All the pieties about hard-working folks won't solve that problem. And there can be little doubt that gas prices go up due to the increase in demand; adding 20-30 million people to a country in a decade or two will have effects in many areas of life. Then there are the strains on infrastructure, and all the rest of our resources.
As Ms. Rodriguez points out, Americans are not having children at a replacement rate, so the explosion of growth in most areas is immigration driven.
So this immigrant baby-boom that Ms. Rodriguez boasts about as a great boon to America will more likely lead to a decline in quality of life in the future, unless the immigrant birth rate drops to a level approximating the native 'Anglo' birthrate. Half a billion people in America will not be good, unless Calcutta or Mumbai are one's idea of paradise.
All growth is not good; surely the problems inherent in excessive population growth should be evident to any thinking person. Unless, of course, one is an ethnic partisan with a 'reconquista' agenda.
The most recent stats available show that in 2003 Latinas had an average of 2.79 babies, compared with 2.04 for women of Asian descent, 2.03 for African-American women and 1.85 for Caucasian women. (American Indians have even lower fertility rates.) Without Latinas, Haub said, the fertility rate in the U.S. would be lower than 2, just below the sustaining level. But average in Latinas, and the rate rises to 2.1 - the perfect balance. Their babies will enter the labor force in the next 15 years in time to offset the retirement of the first of the baby boomers.
Rodriguez loftily says that these facts are something that we Americans don't understand, because 'it's complicated' . Gee thanks, Cindy, for your confidence in the intelligence of us gringos. We can't understand this complicated fact that Latino birthrates are making up for the babies we slow-witted 'Anglos' aren't having.
Our elites keep telling us that Latinos are 'just doing the jobs Americans won't do,' so I guess Miss Cindy, in that vein, is telling us that the Latinas are 'just replacing the population that Americans won't replace.' And she is right in that white American birth rates (and American Indian birthrates) are lower. But Cindy, maybe you don't understand this because it's 'complicated. Look: our elites have been browbeating us since the 1950s to use contraception, to have fewer kids because there was, it seems, a 'population explosion.' So the pill was popularized, and abortion was legalized. And along came the feminists who shamed women for wanting to follow traditional roles, such as housewife and mother; these same feminists convinced women that they were slaves to domesticity, and that they could not be fulfilled unless they had a 'real' career, a paying job outside the home. Additionally, men were lured into the Hugh Hefner 'Playboy' philosophy of life, which saw marriage as a prison for men; Hefner glamorized the urge to be promiscuous and uncommitted to any one woman.
Add all this together, with constant warnings that overpopulation would destroy the world, and voila, lower birth rates. Yet who says that a constant increase in population is absolutely essential? What happened in earlier ages when plagues and epidemics and warfare wiped out large numbers of people? Did the human race vanish? It seems that birth rates have always fluctuated, so why assume that a constant increase is essential?
In time, maybe the Western first world countries would have awakened from their leftist delusions and returned to more normal fertility patterns. The idea that we have to transport millions upon millions of people from one country to another to 'balance' the population is some kind of modern madness; I think it is unprecedented in history, although Ms. Rodriguez seems to regard it as natural, and right as rain.
I also dislike how she smugly implies that the mass invasion of our country is somehow altruistically motivated; these Latina women are somehow giving birth to 'save' America. If this is not arrogance at its worst, I don't know what is.
As for providing a 'comfortable retirement' for gringo baby-boomers, I am not so optimistic that these Latino children she says are saviors of America will be interested in taking care of a generation of old Anglos, given the amount of hostility they are displaying towards Americans and our history. For an illustration of this hostility, check this quote, from Jose Angel Gutierrez, Professor of the University of Texas at Arlington:
We are migrants, free to travel the length and breadth of the Americas because we belong here. We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It's a matter of time. The explosion is in our population."
And from Augustin Cebada, of the 'Brown Berets':
We're here in Westwood, this is the fourth time we've been here in the last two months, to show white Anglo-Saxon Protestant L.A., the few of you who remain, that we are the majority, and we claim this land as ours, sit's always been ours, and we're still here, and none of the talk about deporting. If anyone's going to be deported it's going to be you! Go back to Simi Valley, you skunks! Go back to Woodland Hills! Go back to Boston! To back to the Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You're old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you, leave like beaten rats. You old white people, it is your duty to die. Even their own ethicists say that they should die, that they have a duty to die. They're taking up too much space, too much air. We are the majority in L.A.I know that the willfully blind among us 'gringos', who insist on pretending that we live in Mister Rogers Neighborhood, will dismiss those quotes as just the rantings of a 'tiny minority of extremists.' Fine; if denial helps you make it through these troubled times, then pretend. But there are more such quotes where those came from. Read and listen, if you are prepared for the hostility there.
But suppose we play the liberals' game, and assume that the Latino 'reconquista' is really just a lot of humble, hard-working 'folks' here to make a better life. Fine; we'll assume that, if you insist. But let's look at the issue of population.
Contrary to what some stubborn conservatives say, there was something to the argument that unlimited population growth is a danger. Many conservatives sneer at those they call 'neo-Malthusians' who argue for population control.
Yet even they can't deny that our country is experiencing strains on resources due mostly to immigration. There is a serious water supply problem in many areas of the Southwest, the area which has seen the most growth due to the influx of illegals. All the pieties about hard-working folks won't solve that problem. And there can be little doubt that gas prices go up due to the increase in demand; adding 20-30 million people to a country in a decade or two will have effects in many areas of life. Then there are the strains on infrastructure, and all the rest of our resources.
As Ms. Rodriguez points out, Americans are not having children at a replacement rate, so the explosion of growth in most areas is immigration driven.
So this immigrant baby-boom that Ms. Rodriguez boasts about as a great boon to America will more likely lead to a decline in quality of life in the future, unless the immigrant birth rate drops to a level approximating the native 'Anglo' birthrate. Half a billion people in America will not be good, unless Calcutta or Mumbai are one's idea of paradise.
All growth is not good; surely the problems inherent in excessive population growth should be evident to any thinking person. Unless, of course, one is an ethnic partisan with a 'reconquista' agenda.
Labels: Balance, Population