As you can see from the chart above, over the course of America's first 190 years or so, there have been cycles of immigration. The first being from Ireland and northern Europe during the mid-1800s, followed by an assimilatory breather, followed by another wave in the last 19th/early 20th century, followed by another interregnum where our countries economic and culture could "digest" the new arrivals. Yes, we're a "nation of immigrants," but that immigration was not a perpetual avalanche of foreigners pouring across our borders legally and illegally, as has been the case for the past half-century. The latter is describable as Cloward-Piven immigration, a maximum overdrive overloading of the system until it, eventually, collapses.
For all the justifiable public fixation upon illegal immigration, this has distracted from the equally dire problems with legal immigration and how America isn't being allowed the "breather" it always was earlier in our history. And perhaps nowhere is this phenomenon more garishly displayed than in the following astonishing statistics (via Newsmax Insider):
Wages for the overwhelming majority of Americans have fallen below 1970s levels as the percentage of the population that is foreign-born has surged.
A memo from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), released in response to a request for data from the Senate Judiciary Committee, shows on the other hand that in the decades prior to 1970, when the percentage of foreign-born Americans dropped, wages for most Americans rose.
From 1945 to 1970, the foreign-born population in the United States decreased from 10.97 million to 9.74 million, a decline of 11.2%.
During that twenty-five-year period, the reported income of the bottom 90% of tax filers rose from an average of $18,418, in 2013 dollars, to $33,621 in 1970, an increase of 82.5%.
The share of total income held by the bottom 90% also rose during this period, from 67.4% to 68.5%.
The CRS also disclosed that from 1970 through 2013, the foreign-born population in the U.S. increased from 9.74 million to 41.34 million, a rise of an astounding 324.5%.
During that period, the income of the bottom 90% of tax filers fell from an average of $33,621 in 1970 to $30,980 in 2013, and the share of income they held sank from 68.5% to 53%, a decline of 15.5 percentage points over this 43-year period.
The CRS report "questions claims that native Americans are economically helped by greater immigration," The Washington Examiner observed in an article about the report.
Numbers can be made to lie, folks, but not these. And all because the immigration spigots, legal and illegal, have been left on full instead of being turned off for a few decades to allow our economy and culture to catch its breath.
Gluttony is a useful analogy. When we eat, there arrives a point, after about twenty minutes or so of shoveling it in, that our stomachs start sending signals to our brains telling us, "No more, you're full". Your system needs time to digest what you've taken in. Then, by the time of the next meal, you'll be hungry again and ready to devour some more. Whereas when you keep eating past the point of satiation, eventually you wind up throwing it all back up because your system simply cannot handle the influx.
Legal immigration is great, legal immigration is wonderful, but a four-and-a-quarter-fold increase in our foreign-born population in as many decades is stark raving insane. Even the Golden Goose can't keep honking under that much strain. The numbers, again, speak for themselves.
And yet....
"The report could throw cold water on congressional efforts to expand immigration for tech and other jobs. One bill, sponsored by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and backed by presidential candidate Marco Rubio, would boost guest worker levels and remove any cap on green cards for certain foreign graduates of American colleges and universities."
The U.S. each year already admits a million immigrants, half a million immigrant students, 700,000 guest workers, and 70,000 refugees and persons seeking political asylum.
The CRS report follows an analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) estimating that in the next eight years, the foreign-born population will reach a record high of 51 million.
Another CIS analysis disclosed that since 2000 all net employment growth among working-age adults went to immigrants, while the number of U.S-born adults not working rose by seventeen million. [emphases added]
To employ a cherished leftwing term in other circumstances, that much uninterrupted immigration is not sustainable. At that rate of influx, a third of the population would be foreigners by the end of this century; we would become the minority in our own country a century after that. And, of course, the "elites" are constantly ratcheting up that rate of influx, so those milestones will be realized a lot sooner.
We desperately need to cut off ALL immigration, in accordance with the former cycle, to allow our economy and culture desperately needed time to adjust and recover.
This is the genesis of an emerging genuine conservative economic populism equal or superior to the leftwing Obamunist "steal the wealth" fascism of the past seven years. Senator Jeff Sessions is one of its leading lights:
In an op-ed piece for the New York Times last year, Senator Jeff Sessions, R-AL, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, wrote: "It defies reason to argue that the record admission of new foreign workers has no negative effect on the wages of American workers, including the wages of past immigrants hoping to climb into the middle class.
"Why would many of the largest business groups in the United States spend millions lobbying for the admission of more foreign workers if such policies did not cut labor costs?"
You know who else has gored this sacred cow? Wisconsin Governor Scott "Everyman" Walker, alone of the blundering herd of GOP presidential hopefuls. Just one more reason why, if there is a 2016 presidential election, he is destined to win it.
And give us that breather.
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