If you are finding your Fourth of July weekend diminished by over-packed highways, over-crowded parks, and ill-maintained infrastructures unable to keep up with the people growth, blame the Members of Congress. It is their immigration policies that bear the No. 1 responsibility.
Don't blame the immigrants, who have simply entered upon the invitation of Congress.
Blame Congress.
Since the year 2000, nearly 50 million people have been added to our sprawling cities. And Congress' immigration policies caused most of it, according to Pew Research.
We have a list to show you exactly WHICH Members of Congress are to blame.
Here are the Congress Members who routinely vote to coerce population growth and congestion.
To see the elected officials who are forcing all this congestion, go to:
Scroll down past all the Members with A's and B's (they're the good guys and gals who have tried to slow-down the immigration-driven congestion).
- You'll see 6% of the Members have C-grades, meaning they mainly just get in the way of things ever improving.
- Then, you have the 15% of Members with D's who nearly always vote to force more population increase.
- Finally, you will come to the sad sight of 41% of the elected Members of Congress with F-grades who basically always vote to use immigration to force massive population growth on U.S. communities.
Hardly anything more affects our daily sense of freedom than the decisions by Congress every year to use immigration policy to force the population growth that is the main factor in the increasing congestion, the decreasing mobility, and the constant loss of nearby open space, all of which plays such a major role in the change of our quality of life where we daily live.
Just how much independence in the pursuit of happiness do individual Americans and their local communities have when Congress chooses to add tens of millions of people every few decades?
To see what the Members of Congress from your own state are doing, go to the drop-down box at the top of that grades page and click on your state's name.
U.S. population has doubled since the decade of the greatest freedom of mobility.
In 1950, 152 million Americans luxuriated in the ability to "see the USA in their Chevrolet" (as Dinah Shore sang on her weekly TV show).
Today, 329 million Americans are straining to get around at much-reduced speed and on crumbling roads, and finding it harder to see a lot of the USA over the heads of everybody else trying to see it at the same time.
The 120+ million who have been added since 1970 are almost all the result of Congress quadrupling the level of immigration to allow employers to hold down costs and also to avoid recruiting from American populations the businesses find less desirable for employees.
These decisions and these results are not inevitable. Somebody reaffirms these immigration policies -- or makes them worse -- every year. Those "somebodies" are on our list in the F and D sections.
My favorite patriotic chorus
Amidst an awful lot of Independence Day controversy about patriotism from all sides that is even worse this year than usual, I would offer that we could all benefit from singing the third chorus of Katharine Lee Bates' hymn, America the Beautiful. (She published the lyrics in 1895; the tune to which we sing it was by Samuel A. Ward and attached in 1910).
The chorus:
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw.
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.
No serious or constructive patriotism ignores the flaws of the present or the past, nor does it fail to honor the contributions of the past that led us to the reasons for celebration in our present. We are a national community like all other national communities with special responsibilities for each other in our particular nation. How do you feel that last line of the chorus applies to us now? I think "self-control" is a good one to contemplate in our current tumultuous political climate. Confirm liberty in law? I have no doubt that our liberties cannot thrive absent the widely publicly accepted and supported application of the rule of law. That is not enough by itself to guarantee the kind of freedoms our 1776 Founders had in mind . . . but it is essential.
As always, reasons for concern and reasons for hope on this INDEPENDENCE DAY.
ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA
