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  1. Your ancestors were immigrants
  2. Immigration is good for the economy
  3. We're a nation of immigrants
  4. Immigrants do jobs Americans won't
  5. Immigration reductionists are racists
  6. Immigrants built this country
  7. Immigrants just want a better life
  8. Immigration adds diversity
  9. Immigration is good for the economy
  10. There is plenty of room for more people
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      • AILA dictates, McCain regurgitates

Immigration Helps Economy

Between the years 1925 and 1965, immigration to the United States was so low the number of immigrants in the United States actually decreased. Yet during that time out from immigration, we Americans built the richest country the world has ever seen. We also successfully prosecuted a world war against two major powers simultaneously, accomplished historically unprecedented civil rights gains, put a man on the moon, and invented computers and rock and roll, and still managed to get our lawns mowed.

We can be rich without an endless flood of mass immigration.

It's true that immigration grows the overall economy, but so what? If a half billion Chinese were to move from China to the United States tomorrow, the U.S. economy would grow (i.e., there would be more total economic activity in the United States) and China's would shrink, but is that a good thing necessarily? Lawrence Kudlow, the TV "economist," and (the regrettably unretired) Jack Welch both seem to think so. They share the Chamber of Commerce's definition of "economy."

Compare the total economic output of the countries listed in the chart at right—from tiny Luxembourg, with an economic aggregate of just $27.3 billion, to the giant of the world, the United States, with $11.75 trillion.

Then click on the chart. These are the same countries in the same order, except this time, we've calculated in the size of the population. When you look at it like that—in terms of total economic output per person—it tells a far different story.

Little Luxembourg doesn't look so little anymore, Denmark and Nigeria are not the equals the first chart seemed to indicate, the U.S. is no longer the giant of the world, and while immigration fanatics like George W. Bush like to describe Mexican immigrants as fleeing starvation, that hardly appears to be the case.

So the next time Tamar Jacoby comes by and starts stroking your arm and cooing in your ear about how our economy needs immigration to grow, call her on her fraud: whose economy?

It's too bad Alan Greenspan wasn't exposed for the old fraud he is while he was the Fed chairman. When he started mumbling on during some senate testimony about how the United States must open the gates to immigration so we can keep "our" economy growing, it would have been great had we a senator on the committee with the intelligence and character to nail him.

The size of the overall economy is an economic statistic with no value outside its usefulness to frauds like Lawrence Kudlow, Tamar Jacoby, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal as a means to hoodwink gullible and short-sighted Americans into acquiescing to the radical transformation of their country through mass immigration.

The economic indicator that matters is the one depicted in the second chart above; no one is emigrating from Luxembourg to Nigeria. Immigration is driving us down in terms of the second chart, yet because a few immigration lawyers and business special interests (and their lobbyists) find mass immigration profitable, the relentless flood of humanity continues unabated.

Reason #1
Your ancestors were immigrants!