Immigration Realities
We need more immigrants, not fewer. The reasons are simple:
The number of workers supporting each social security retiree has been dropping since Social Security was established. We have three choices: Increase the number of workers, requiring increased immigration; Reduce Social Security Benefits drastically; Continue printing ever-less-valuable money, a stealthier route to reducing benefits.
When the Social Security System was first established under Franklin Roosevelt, several promises were made:
· Benefits would only go to those who had contributed to the system. That promise was broken when spouses could collect against their partners’ earnings.
· Benefits were intended to supplement other savings and pensions, not provide sole income in retirement. That promise was broken at the same time that floors were established
· Benefits would always be proportional to contributions. That promise was broken when floors were established on benefits. The rationale used was that the actual contributions didn’t provide enough to live on as a sole source of income, something that was never intended when established.
· Benefits would never be taxed. Foolish me, I believed all of this, and put away savings and qualified for multiple pensions throughout my life. I now pay income tax on Social Security benefits every year.
The same has been done over and over so many times that we have stopped believing anything said by government about entitlement programs.
Naturalized citizens create new businesses at twice the rate of the native-born. New small businesses are the engine of economic growth. The Obama administration’s highly-successful war on small business caused irrational consolidation and raised the per-employee Federal regulatory compliance cost by 60% in eight years on an after-inflation basis. I have thoughts about why this was done, but they are merely informed speculation and can neither be proven nor disproven.
Legal Immigration
The legal immigration system is a joke. We require years of waiting for anyone to immigrate legally from countries where it is easy to conduct extensive and accurate records searches. We will, however, admit endless refugees from Afghanistan where the vetting process was limited to who could run the fastest to secure a spot onboard a departing plane. We turn around Haitians and send them back to a country many of them have not seen in decades, because they’ve been employed in friendly countries such as Chile or Brazil. None of this makes any sense.
When Social Security, and later Medicare, were established, contributions outpaced withdrawals by large amounts. Every minimally-competent actuary in the country knew the future: eventually, the inflow would become an outflow, so every penny of contributions had to be safeguarded against that certainty. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson wanted money for Guns and Butter, so he brought both Social Security and Medicare “on budget” to disguise the size of the deficits. When Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson, he knew what would eventually happen, but chose to keep the excess contributions available for immediate expenditures rather than lose the next election. By the time Gerald Ford took office, he had far greater problems to deal with. Our inheritance was squandered in front of our eyes.
Fix immigration now. Take control of the southern border so that we can screen for disease and links to terrorism, and reduce both imports of fentanyl and sex slaves. Our country is better than this. We cannot continue to subject people to exploitation and drug deaths, while enriching the Mexican cartels.
We need more immigrants to fix this. If they follow a different religion, or have different skin color or ethnicity, who cares? We can’t get by without them.
We certainly could use a better immigration system but the equity warriors have insisted on some of the least trainable cohort. But nearly everybody arrives hoping to work and find economic security. In order to handle the new workers we need some way to write off training costs. We also need a limit on contractual hires in high tech intended to drive down fair labor costs. In the process we need to improve education down the line and find places for well educated but clueless graduates. But the immigrants do bring a work ethic sorely needed by too many who lack it.
The cost to the nation of implementing his only campaign promise was excruciating and won't be finished for at least another 20 years.