Uhm, no. He’s lying. America is going to suffer mightily from the lack of immigrants. (NYT gift link)
Across the United States, someone is missing.
One year into President Trump’s immigration crackdown, construction firms in Louisiana are scrambling to find carpenters. Hospitals in West Virginia have lost out on doctors and nurses who were planning to come from overseas. A neighborhood soccer league in Memphis cannot field enough teams because immigrant children have stopped showing up.
America is closing its doors to the world, sealing the border, squeezing the legal avenues to entry and sending new arrivals and longtime residents to the exits.
The shortages will be felt most acutely in areas that require “hands on” work — the medical field, child care, food, agriculture. But it won’t just be those manual labor jobs. The article says that half of the people who entered since 2018 have college degrees and they are the kind of people who start businesses and fuel the economy. We are impoverishing ourselves on purpose.
The people who are going to feel this most are families who need child care for their kids and help for their elderly parents, of which there are going to be massive numbers as the baby boomers start to hit that very elderly stage. (Keep in mind that Joe Biden isn’t even a baby boomer. The biggest numbers of them are just starting to hit their late 60s and 70s.) Good luck to American families facing that responsibility over the next couple of decades.
I’ve included a gift link to the whole article because it’s long and comprehensive, going into the history of immigration in the U.S. and how previous curbs both hurt and benefited American workers. If Stephen Miller thinks that the great economic success of the post-war in the country was due to not having a lot of immigration he’s even dumber than he seems. The U.S. was the only big advanced nation left standing and we helped rebuild the world — a very lucrative undertaking.
Anyway, it’s not just the horror of the racism and xenophobia or the twisted idea that diversity is a weakness (not to mention the absurd concept of “Heritage Americans.”) It’s the fact that we have not learned on goddamned thing from our past. It’s just so … stupid.