Population and Immigration Reductions Urgently Needed by All Nations

By Donald A. Collins | 15 October 2018
Church and State

On September 29th, as Co-Chair of the National Advisory Board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), I had the opportunity at our annual meeting in Washington to introduce a panel of distinguished authorities who favor real immigration reform, an issue which has become urgently in need of repair for decades.

I offered to our members comments about the history of immigration since the founding of FAIR in 1979, almost 40 years ago. Since then I have written many op ed pieces about reform. At the meeting, I handed out one of those articles written in 2006 so my audience could see that not much has changed since then except for the worse. I encourage you to read this op ed, entitled “A Symbol of Our Coming Chaos” below.

Here are the major points that I said to that gathering of over 100 key leaders in the real immigration reform movement about FAIR and what remains its pivotal role in working for real immigration reform.

When FAIR’s founders set out in 1979 to drain the swamp of misguided immigration policies and trends, they could hardly have envisioned that after almost 40 years we would still be facing conditions which to me seem even worse than in 1979. You can read my 2006 op ed piece which has been handed out and see that so little has changed except for the worse. Reminds me of that story about the little Dutch boy who we were told in 1865 put his finger in a leaking dyke and saved the city of Haalem in Holland. It’s a perfect analogy except that the story is likely apocryphal AND in 1979 our US population was 222 million, 299 million at the time I wrote my 2006 op ed and as noted our US population is now 326 million. The horse and the barn analogy might be a better one.

World population in 1979 was about 4 billion; it is now 7.6 billion, projected to be 10 billion by mid-century. No surprise that as we face more growth in world population it makes it even more vitally important that FAIR continues its efforts to slow immigration. It will remain difficult as obviously the growth of human numbers here and worldwide has deeply influenced the pressures for growing human migration.

In short, FAIR, as my 2006 op ed points out, has been bravely holding its own against an implacable tide of powerful special interests who have succeeded in adding huge numbers of unneeded immigrants to our population since 1979.

It is already clear from decades of polling that the majority of our citizens already understand the need for reform. Mr Trump rode that concern to the White House.

Regardless of his unpopularity or his positions on many other issues, all American citizens should hope that getting real immigration reform, returning immigration administration to the rule of law so the overall needed reforms he promised can be achieved.

I closed with one major point. FAIR supporters and those seeking real immigration reform in 1979 were often called racists then. That false charge comes up even more so now. For example, those who use the term “illegal alien” have been accused by some open border advocates as using “hate speech”.

In my decades of association with FAIR, as a board member and now as Co-Chair of its National Advisory Board, I can personally affirm that we at FAIR have never been racists! We simply held firmly to our perception that the rule of law should prevail and that we favor new immigrants in reasonable numbers, but not illegally or the huge amounts which have changed our cultural and political landscape without the votes of our citizens. We have always been anxious to welcome legal new comers who have been properly vetted as likely good citizens. We stand for reasonable immigration numbers, always seeking to encourage those immigrants who as vital new citizens legally arrive here to be ready to contribute to our national welfare.

A symbol of our coming chaos

By Donald Collins | 25 November 2006
TribLIVE

On Oct. 27, my wife, Sally, and I awoke at 5 a.m. in our Northwest Washington, D.C., home to start on a business trip to Chicago. We decided to get breakfast at Dulles International Airport.

We were at Dulles at 6:20 a.m. The line at the United Economy fare line was staggeringly long. But by 7 a.m. we actually had our tickets in time to press on the next huge line to get through security.

This took another 40 minutes, punctuated by a TSA employee confiscating my wife’s prescription toothpaste, her eyebrow liner dispenser, her anti-bacterial hand lotion and her nail polish. Actually, the TSA lady was very nice and deftly took only a couple of minutes to extract what Sally admittedly should have not taken in her carry-on luggage.

One of those famous Dulles personnel carrier buses lumbered from the A Terminal — the one in the front — to the C Terminal. We arrived at the C Terminal, got to the proper gate at 7:52 a.m., just in time to learn that the Chicago flight had been delayed until 9 a.m.

Consequently, we had plenty of time for Southwest Burrito, the only food service in sight, which was not bad, and read in a Washington Post article about how no protective wall to keep out invaders works.

The Great Wall of China would have worked better. But the Ming Dynasty came down anyway. There may be a lesson for all of us here: No wall works if the will of the government that builds it fails! That Chinese government showed stupidity and venality, something our own government appears to want to emulate.

Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers https://t.co/cLZuaoqOwF #h1b

— Patrick Thibodeau (@pthibodeau11) September 12, 2016

So why tell you of this common snafu of modern travel, one which we all experience frequently?

Because if our leaders for the past 35 years had been thinking about the national interest instead of their personal interests, we wouldn’t have 300 million people crowded into systems that are becoming increasingly dysfunctional for the average citizen.

If our captains of industry hadn’t decided to import cheap slave labor while paying our Congress to look the other way, building any wall would not be necessary. And our population would be about 225 million, not on the way to 500 million by 2050 and 1 billion by 2100.

Here they are backdating their stock options and paying themselves salaries 369 times the average wage of the hourly wage workers in their companies while paying lobbyists, who outnumber the elected officials in Congress 5-to-1, to keep the borders open.

These worthies can well afford to take their corporate jets above the maddening delays at the nation’s airports and send their kids to well-run private schools while watching their minions on the Hill avoid enforcing the laws on the books, let alone enacting urgently needed controls on immigration.

Of course, with all this imported cheap labor around, our kids get to hang out in malls instead of cutting the grass or helping with other chores at home or get a summer job like my generation did. Then, we learned punctuality and the value of manual labor as a powerful inducement to not do it later in life if possible.

So send our young men and women off to foreign wars and then don’t offer them the GI education bill if they don’t get killed. Or if kids do get to college, be sure the tuition is exorbitantly high so they can graduate with an indebtedness so big it would have bought a very nice house in my era.

So what will this election prove? Controlling the incoming House are Open Border Democrats headed by Nancy Pelosi. The majority of the Senate already is “open border,” as is our president.

Oh, yes, I know you can’t wait to know how our trip ended. We finally got to Chicago, coming out of our jetway just in time to hear the public address announcer saying that Homeland Security had raised the terror alert level to Orange (for reasons, of course, no one knew).

Fortunately, our hotel was right across the street and we got to our room exhausted at 11 a.m. local time — a simple door-to-door transit of 7 hours.

This sort of uncomfortable daily life circumstance is happening all over America in our large cities. And it is not going to get better until we understand the price of being slaves to these captains of industry is very high indeed.

As long as they can buy Congress and the White House, we poor middle-class and blue-collar citizens are in for a worse drubbing.

Watch what happens to our schools. You think they are bad now. And what about our public services?

We are moving into a soup of people. No one will know what to do. The rule of law will be breached again and again. And most of us won’t even know it. The dissolution of our great country will continue if we don’t get control of our elected officials and bring this corporate oligarchy to heel.

Sessions would often argue that immigration bills were Wall Street backed & USA workers face lower wages from competition – legal or illegal – from immigrants.

— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) January 18, 2018

Endless growth, open borders, loss of public services we pay for to the growing hordes of legal and illegal aliens, elections paid for by the special interests instead of a system of government-funded campaigns paid for from the tax stream, out-of-control spending by both parties, national debt beyond our ability to pay for it ever are but a few of the impending disasters.

The solutions are numerous:

• The wall approved by Bush (as an 11th-hour political promise) is a start (if it ever gets built)

• Stick with paper ballots until we are assured that electronic ones work

• Force public financing for all national elections and gradually work toward such funding at the state and local levels

• Cut illegal immigration through proper IDs, making employers personally liable for hiring illegals

• Bring immigration levels back to “replacement”; be conscious that more population is not necessary

• Make our foreign policy one of conciliation and cooperation, not arrogance and lack of openness

• Stop using the threat of terror to steal our civil rights and undermine our democracy.

Quite a laundry list, although one that could realistically be accomplished over several election cycles. But we must begin with immigration reform as No. 1 right now. Five-hundred million people by 2050 will make urban America uninhabitable.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.

From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013

By Donald A. Collins
Publisher: Church and State Press (July 30, 2014)
ASIN: B00MA40TVE
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