Melting Pot Blues

Looked at one way, it is somewhat surprising that academics have become advocates of open immigration. “I went to journalism school in the 1960s — specialized in environmental reporting — covered the beginning of the environmental movement,” Roy Beck of Numbers USA said at the National Press Club on August 30. “So I covered the vision for America that the environmental movement had, and that vision was that the 200 million population of America of . . . around 1970 would basically stabilize at around 250 million in the 1990s, maybe a little bit into the 21st century.”

The numerals that Numbers USA is concerned about are the tallies of legal and illegal immigrants in the United States. “Well, what is the nation with the biggest population explosion in history?” the American Enterprise Institute’s Ben Wattenberg asked rhetorically. “You’re in it.”
“In 1790, there were 4 million Americans — that was our first census — and today there are 300 million.”

“Germans, the biggest sub-group in America is Germans,” Wattenberg claimed. “Benjamin Franklin railed against Germans.”

(Full disclosure: That is two-thirds of my ancestry. By the way, part of the German population in the United States did get to be something of a problem in the first half of the twentieth century and led to, among other things, the formation of the U. S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities in the years leading up to the Second World War.)

Wattenberg takes a sunnier view of open borders. “Every study we have by the Environmental Protection Agency shows that pollution — air, water, land — is going down,” he pointed out to Beck. Wattenberg, a scholar at AEI, specializes in demographic trends. For his part, Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) noted that “immigration was low for about 50 to 60 years” in the 20th Century.

Camarota authored a study for CIS entitled 100 Million More: Projecting the Impact of Immigration on the U. S. Population, 2007 to 2060. In the study, Camarota drew heavily on data from the U. S. Census Bureau.

In the course of his research, Camarota found the notion that robust immigrants will replenish a graying American workforce to be mostly wishful thinking. “Immigrants allowed into the country today become tomorrow’s retirees, adding to the future retirement population,” Camarota said at the Press Club. “It may surprise some but the average age of an immigrant in 2006 was 40 years of age.”

“As I said, the average age of a native was 36, and this reminds us of this important fact — that immigrants age like everyone else.” Nevertheless, the idea that new blood will revitalize tired old corpuscles is, according to CIS, a backbone of U. S. immigration policy.

“In effect, immigration is presented as a way to supplement the inadequate breeding efforts of the American people because business and other interests think that Americans are making the wrong decisions about how many children to have,” Mark Kirkorian, also of CIS, asserted. Not to be outdone, open immigration enthusiast Wattenberg brought along his own living, breathing visual aid.

“Iris, could you just stand up for a moment?” he asked. A well-dressed young woman then did just that.

“She is ostensibly my housekeeper, which is a thankless task but surely an
essential one,” Wattenberg explained. “But as it turns out, she also knows more tech stuff than I do.”

“Iris recently received a raise as my housekeeper and she may be getting another one as a tech consultant,” Wattenberg reported. “I do some things quite well but that it not one of them.”

“Iris, that’s a suggestion, not a promise,” Wattenberg quickly added. He did not discuss the dollar amounts in question.

“By the way, Iris was here as an illegal immigrant and was smuggled in by a
coyote in the trunk of a car with 15 other people” Wattenberg revealed. “And it’s hard to believe, but if you remember those telephone booth contests, it’s conceivable.”

He gave more personal details on Iris:

• “Iris has three children”; and

• “Her husband left her a few years ago, so she is a single mom.”

One thing that we can be sure of is that Wattenberg did not find Iris on myspace.com or Facebook.com. As he made clear, she handles his information technology.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.