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Letting Illegal Immigrants, (or Criminals) into the Country is NOT helping anything.
I have pointed out that immigrants help reduce the aging of the population. The majority of immigrants, even illegal immigrants - especially illegal immigrants, are young and add to the workforce. Legalizing illegal immigrants actually serves to educate and improve them, making them more productive to society and help resolve the issues caused by declining birth rate. If you have a different solution, go ahead and propose it and explain why it will work. This is the exact purpose of this thread.
I read a past article in The Economist, as to how France was responding to their low fertility rate, one of the few countries to raise their fertility rate, but at big price to the government: free day care, lower income taxes and free train tickets!
That would be one good way to increase the fertility rate in this country, for starters: free day care paid for by the government!
France is doing very well indeed! Their birth rates in the 1990's were below 1.8, but they have climbed up to over 2 in recent years. I would argue that in the long term, this is a more effective solution than allowing more immigrants who can potentially disrupt the culture and customs and prove more costly.
I have pointed out that immigrants help reduce the aging of the population. The majority of immigrants, even illegal immigrants - especially illegal immigrants, are young and add to the workforce. Legalizing illegal immigrants actually serves to educate and improve them, making them more productive to society and help resolve the issues caused by declining birth rate. If you have a different solution, go ahead and propose it and explain why it will work. This is the exact purpose of this thread.
The only thing that illegals (young and old) do to the work force is displace Americans.
Don't you get it? Illegal aliens are parasites that take far, far more than they give
If you think that legalizing illegal aliens, will "serve to educated and improve them", well...I have some oceanfront property in Arizona to sell to you. Most illegals from south of the border are functionally illiterate. Heck, some don't even speak Spanish but speak an obscure Indian language. The latest batch of "young illegals" to show up at the border couldn't even count to 10 in Spanish!
Why should we legalize illegal aliens? Doing so is an insult to those who came here legally.
Here's what needs to be done---make life so difficult for illegals that they will leave on their own accord. Make E-verify the law of the land and run everybody in the work force through it and weed out those 8 million no-match SSNs. Arrest and prosecute any illegals who engage in ID theft. Put an end to the whole anchor baby/birth tourism fiasco. If illegals can't find work and can't collect freebies via their anchor babies, then they will leave on their own accord. Would you stay someplace if you couldn't find work or tap into any welfare programs?
Don't you get it when it comes to increasing the population? Once again, we are running out of potable water and buildable land. Experts say there is no way to tell how much water is in those underground aquifers in Phoenix and Tucson, thus no way to know when they will go dry. Florida has pumped out so many underground sources of water that it is creating sink holes.
The birth rate in the US is lower than 1.9, way below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population. As birth rate stays low, not only will the population eventually decrease but the demographic composition will also shift toward the old. Already about 20% of the US population is above the age of 65. As mortality improves, the old population will increase while the younger population is declining with birth rate and also has to devote more resources and labor to taking care of the old. Eventually this will be unsustainable. The problem is even more pronounced in a few other developed countries.
An obvious solution is allowing more young immigrants, but I was wondering if there is another real solution apart from this.
I want to turn your entire premise around and point out that the U.S. population is:
A) Already too large, if one cares about preserving nature, avoiding worse crowds and traffic jams, reducing pollution, curbing crime, etc.
B) Likely to grow to at least 400 million by 2050 with present immigration rates. What gives you the idea that we need even more people?!
An economy based on perpetual debt and population growth (to service debt but never pay it off) is sick and unnatural. This applies to the entire globe. People claim to want a balanced budget but fail to realize that the whole system is based on fiat money, created out of thin air from loans. As long as you have interest-based loans, you never have true balance. The modern economy thrives on lack of balance and constant consumption, yet claims it wants balance! And nature is being constantly eaten away to prop the whole thing up; logging, fossil fuel depletion, water depletion, overfishing, etc.
I posted this response in your other thread so I'll copy and paste it here:
Have you looked at the negatives that are involved with increasing the population?
Our resources are finite. We are running out of potable water and buildable land. Our infrastructure is crumbling and there isn't the money to properly repair it---let alone add to it. We have gridlock on many of our roads.
Back in the 60s, liberals were all about ZPG (zero population growth) to the point that many decided to not have kids so they wouldn't contribute to overpopulation. Now, liberals are pushing to add more and more people. Talk about doing a 180!
Why is decreasing population so worrisome? If anything, it means that we are looking to the future when it comes to managing natural resources and preserving farmland.
The world is indeed finite, but don't tell the economy! It thrives on Ponzi-style growth and the average fool doesn't think much about where resources come from - except for gas pumps and store shelves.
Technically, "liberals" were for ZPG and many still are, but it wasn't a flip-flop as you portray it. They are more into political correctness and not offending ethnic groups with high birthrates. I look at people as I do any other animal species subject to the laws of carrying capacity.
The main reason humans have pushed those limits is cheap fossil fuels, which offered an illusion of plenitude. The current low price of oil is a fluke based on U.S. shale fracking plus a deliberate OPEC glut to make fracking (e.g. Bakken) impractical by lowering the cost to where tight oil isn't competitive. Geologically, this can't last when you look at peak depletion curves. We will soon find out that propping up such a large population isn't easy without cheap oil and constantly growing supplies of it.
People who call for an endlessly rising population, are, as Paul Ehrlich put it, "madmen or economists." You can test the endless growth theory on an island to see how stupid it is, then try to scale it to the entire planet. The only difference is the time it takes to reach overload. I find that very few people have the temerity to face that issue honestly. They want the perks of economic growth but refuse to accept any limits to it. I think that's why global warming denial and apathy (curbs on fossil fuels, hence on growth) is so widespread. People want what they want and they want more of it.
The birth rate in the US is lower than 1.9, way below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population. As birth rate stays low, not only will the population eventually decrease but the demographic composition will also shift toward the old. Already about 20% of the US population is above the age of 65. As mortality improves, the old population will increase while the younger population is declining with birth rate and also has to devote more resources and labor to taking care of the old. Eventually this will be unsustainable. The problem is even more pronounced in a few other developed countries.
An obvious solution is allowing more young immigrants, but I was wondering if there is another real solution apart from this.
For anyone who thinks a finite planet needs an always-growing human population, I suggest reading at least 10 paragraphs of this book chapter. The author has been maligned over the years due to cherry-picking of certain "failed" predictions, but he's always been right about the chronic destruction of nature and the greenwashing that pretends it's not so bad. "Let's just recycle and pretend that people aren't really overpopulated."
There's a lot more to the world than just feeding and housing people at the expense of other species. The latest assault on nature is coming from renewable energy projects in the form of wind turbine armies, cresting ridge-lines at every turn and destroying what's left of rural scenery.
Declining population is a good thing for the earth and fellow humans. There are too many of us fighting over the limited resources. Brutal.
True. Those of us who take an interest in such things as birth rate take heart in observations such as yours.
There will be problems associated with the coming decline in world population. Japan has illustrated what those problems may be, and someday China will demonstrate to the world what a population of old, orphaned, never-married men will do to a country. (Google "China Demographic Time Bomb") Already, the population in China for the less-than-30 set is 120 women for 100 men.
I am optimistic. The world will become a better place, with fewer humans and some day fewer extant races.
Some day we will all look like Tiger Woods or Halley Berry. Not a terrible thought, that.
The birth rate in the US is lower than 1.9, way below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population. As birth rate stays low, not only will the population eventually decrease but the demographic composition will also shift toward the old. Already about 20% of the US population is above the age of 65. As mortality improves, the old population will increase while the younger population is declining with birth rate and also has to devote more resources and labor to taking care of the old. Eventually this will be unsustainable. The problem is even more pronounced in a few other developed countries.
An obvious solution is allowing more young immigrants, but I was wondering if there is another real solution apart from this.
Why do we need more people? aren't there enough on welfare already? unemployed? I really hope "immigration" doesn't turn into breeding ground here cause that would suck even more.
The only thing that illegals (young and old) do to the work force is displace Americans.
You wrote an entire lengthy post and still failed to address the issue I raised in the original post: aging population. As I mentioned before, without supplying the population with younger people, eventually the population will be mostly older people who are going to need support and care from the young. What do you suppose is the solution if birth rate stays low and immigration isn't an option?
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Too many people, not too few!
