Up to now, there has been minimal if any media discussion on the impact the current, record border crisis is having on housing and shelter resources in the U.S. Recent media coverages, though, detail how the Biden administration is depending upon overburdened non profits and requesting unprecedented FEMA funding amidst the chaos.
With strong public commitment and political support for immigration reduction, aggregate water consumption could be reduced even more, allowing still more water to remain where it belongs — in natural streams, rivers, and lakes — where it furnishes ecological benefits to habitat, wildlife, and society.
For eight days in July 1834, immigrants' fear of the mere possibility of a future flood of newly freed slaves from the South competing with them for jobs in New York City boiled over into a full-scale riot involving thousands. This Juneteenth is a good time to think about the forces that had long opposed emancipation, perhaps none more vigorously in the North than new immigrants from Europe -- a product of thoughtless, uncontrolled mass immigration.
The issue of high levels of immigration is not unique to the United States. An op-ed from the United Kingdom's The Times explains how Britain has recently grappled with the same situation. The overarching point is applicable to the United States: resources and land are finite and housing shortages are already pervasive. This continued population growth, which is driven by immigration policies, is out of the control of the average person as each country's governments are at the helm.
When given the option by Congress, many employers choose the "low road" and forgo domestic recruitment. A new article in Bloomberg puts a face to those bypassed workers.
Every year, there is a proposal to "staple a green card to the diploma" of a foreign student who earns a PhD. The idea that there aren't enough intelligent Americans to fill the smart jobs has been especially sticky with a particular subset of Americans, Members of the United States Congress, but it isn't true.
As early as the 1980s, The National Science Foundation (NSF) urged lawmakers to admit more foreign students into Ph.D programs for the purpose of depressing wages.
A lawsuit was filed in Nevada this week alleging what is effectively a racket by ranchers conspiring to artificially deflate wages for both foreign and domestic shepherds. It is clear to anyone paying attention that the current framework for the agricultural guest worker program, H-2A, is not helping foreign or domestic workers, and at scale our temporary work programs are in fact suppressing wages and working conditions for workers to the sole benefit of employers.
Contra Elon Musk, ecological sustainability isn't a question of how many people a land mass can contain, but how many it can sustain. People can go just about anywhere for short periods of time, but if they want to put down roots and maintain a certain standard of living they are going to need large amounts of biologically productive space nearby. There's the rub.
No collection of sacrifices by any of the rest of us in service to our national community can ever add up to the single sacrifice of a person's very life. How can we possibly give the honor and respect earned by that sacrifice? The impossibility, however, does not release us from a responsibility to try.