Thursday, August 19, 2021

Reversing America's Current Demographic Decline

Shikha Dalmia is a leftist immigrant from India, and writes in the NY Times:
Over the last century, two moments that transformed America and positioned it as the global economic leader were the post-World War II economic boom and the I.T. revolution of the 1990s. In both cases, America tore down many forms of discrimination and other barriers to harness the talents of marginalized groups in the country and to welcome new ones, injecting demographic vitality into the economy.

To continue America’s upward trajectory in the 21st century, the country must reverse its current demographic decline. As the Census Bureau reported last week, in the past decade, the U.S. population grew at the second slowest rate since the government started counting in 1790 — and the slowest since the 1930s.

The most expeditious way out might be if the federal government gave up its monopoly on immigration and allowed states to bring in workers from anywhere in the world, based on their own labor needs, without being held to federal quotas. The growing concern is that the United States is facing a population bust.

No, this is cuckoo. The American economic booms were due almost entirely to the creativity and hard work of native-born White Americans.

Yes, I know we imported thousands of IT workers from India. They were mostly low-skilled, and did grunt work cheaper than Americans. Some of the work is farmed out to India.

But the success of Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc, is not based on paying Indian programmers slightly less money.

Our demographic decline is that we have way too many immigrants. Home prices are skyrocketing because we have too many people and not enough homes. The Colorado River is running dry from heavy demand, and now water has to be rationed to western states. California is recalling its governor. No one has room for the millions of Afghan refugees that we might be getting.

Dalmia says her expertise is in "the rise of populist authoritarianism". I think that is a code phrase for being a Trump-hater, even tho it is now clear that Pres. Biden is more of an authoritarian than Trump.

2 comments:

MikeAdamson said...

It's the birthrate. No doubt the globalization of the division of labour does play a role but if white folks weren't having less babies then you would still be a happy camper.

Roger said...

No, we would still have too many people.