Breeding Poverty

by digby

Here’s an interesting new argument about abortion and immigration from Chuck Colson, via Media Matters:

But what’s the root of the problem? Why do we have a shortage of workers? Aha, that’s the unspeakable “A” word that the elite dread the most: abortion. The reason we must allow millions of illegal aliens in to fill these jobs is because we have murdered a generation that would otherwise be filling them: 40 million sacrificed since 1973 to the god of self-fulfillment. And Americans are barely maintaining a replacement-level birthrate of 2.1 children per woman.

Remember the compassionate stuff that the abortionists used to tell us: “We are just preventing these poor kids from growing up in deprived, impoverished circumstances”? Hah! False. What happens is that others come in from abroad to live in those deprived, difficult, and impoverished circumstances and at great public cost.

I don’t get this logic. Assuming that anyone ever actually said this about abortion preventing kids from growing up in deprived circumstances, I doubt the meaning was that by having abortions, poverty would disappear. It was that some women would not be bringing unwanted children into poverty. What am I missing? How does that fact that “aliens” live in poverty make that statement false?

And is Colson really saying that we need to up the replacement-level birthrate in order to fill these low paying unskilled jobs that force people to live in deprived, impoverished circumstances? Doesn’t that evoke unpleasant associations with orphan trains and breeding bonded or slave labor? Creepy.

Besides, I thought the illegal immigration problem was that the 12 million illegal immigrants were taking jobs from Americans who are already here. If we had 40 million more Americans competing for all those low-paying, unskilled jobs, the unemployment rate would be in the stratosphere and we’d be in economic meltdown.

Or perhaps Colson is suggesting that these tens of millions of poverty stricken Americans would be even more exploited than the “aliens” are now, with no rights, no legal protections and below minimum wage, off-the-books jobs. That would solve the illegal immigration problem, all right. Why didn’t someone think of that before? (Oh that’s right, they did. Back in the good old days the Republicans want to take us back to — before we had labor laws.)

Like I said, a very creepy argument that leads to some very disturbing conclusions.

.