A Nation Of Immigrants

Sometime over this past week President Trump may have called some foreign nations from which we receive some immigrants a vulgar name.  He denies it, and while it seemed pretty clear at first that it had happened, some in the room don't recall him saying it either. 

At any rate, this has thrown immigration into the spotlight and, as predictable, a political figure appeared on Meet The Press and repeatedly used the common phrase "We're a nation of immigrants".  I had to give a Republican figure credit for noting a study which found that if we let everyone in the country who wanted in, it would increase our population by 700,000,000 immigrants.

And that's something we should pause and consider.

Not because it's going to happen overnight, but rather because our official policy is unending large scale immigration partially because "we're a nation of immigrants"

I've written recently on immigration here on our post Everyone is wrong about American Immigration Policy.  I know that nobody is going to follow my advice on this, but the idea that we must have immigration because "we're a nation of immigrants" is simply stupid.

It might be true, unless of course you are a Native American in which that statement must be a bitter one indeed, but just because a nation was something isn't a defense to anything.  We were a nation of slaveholders as well, which doesn't justify slavery.

And in real terms a nation has to consider immigration in the context of what its trying to do, and if it can do it.  Ireland, for example, couldn't take in the number of immigrants that we do, but Russia surely could.  How long can we take in immigrants at the current rate before the nation suffers in some fashion because of it, and what rate is sustainable or unsustainable?

Whatever the answer to those questions are, that fact that most of the people in this country descend from immigrants isn't really relevant to the current discussion.  In any sense.