Is high immigration a policy the United States should use as a humanitarian response to help the poor of the world?
Bernie Sanders shocked a lot of journalists and other immigration expansionists this week by indicating that the answer is NO.
Some of his statements could be used as an intro to my so-called "Gumballs Video" which has been watched in various versions by millions since the first recording in 1996. Here is the most recent version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE
My video primarily shows the mathematical virtual impossibility that U.S. immigration could ever lower world poverty by more than a drop in the bucket.
Sanders' comments this week seem to recognize that but focus more on the ethical and practical reasons why trying to help the world's poor through immigration would be the wrong thing to do. When a journalist suggested that as a socialist Sanders should support much-higher immigration even to the point of open borders to help the world's poor, Sanders responded:
You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids? I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer." -- BERNIE SANDERS
Wouldn't you just love to watch some of the Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates squirm trying to avoid answering the question of whether they think we should help the world's poor by making Americans poorer?
I want to hear candidates of both parties tell us whether they agree with Sanders' statements. If they do agree, they need to give us an actual number of how many foreign workers we ought to be bringing in each year to take jobs instead of our own poor getting them.
(Read much more about Sanders' fascinating interaction with the media this week in Jeremy's blog at: https://www.numbersusa.com/blog/sanders-broke-medias-unwritten-rule-abou...)
How many of these candidates would dare to say that too many American teens are already working and we should bring in more lower-skilled immigrants to compete with our teens?
The immigration debate could be turned around by quite a bit if reporters asked those kinds of questions. Since few will, the job falls to citizens to ask these questions every chance they get.
The current version of my Gumballs Video begins with :
Some people say mass immigration into the United States can reduce world poverty."
I have seen hundreds of comments on those internet postings that suggest that the question is silly because supposedly nobody is proposing immigration for international humanitarian purposes.
Of course, I know differently because I have heard plenty of religious and other ethical leaders propose high U.S. immigration precisely as a way to be good world citizens.
In the response of a number of the media that Jeremy details in his blog, we learn that there truly are highly influential people and institutions that push a U.S. immigration policy on the argument that it should help solve world poverty.
Perhaps readers here would want to help counteract such arguments by sharing with others the link to the Gumballs Video and these blogs about the smart things that Bernie Sanders said this week.
I noted in an interview over at CNN yesterday that Sanders' statements this week line up with those of Scott Walker and Rick Santorum who have also upset the mainstream media by claiming that immigration policy should be set based on what is best for American workers and their families.
Every politician in August should be pressed to say whether they agree with these statements and, if so, what policies they propose to advance those principles.
ROY BECK is Founder & President of NumbersUSA
