IMMIGRATION
The Fence Around the Ivory Tower
Steve Sailer, Taki's Magazine, 2/27/2013
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With immigration policy back in the news, I’m reminded that when I was a lad 40 years ago, the cutting-edge wisdom was that rapid population growth was a major problem. (Granted, my parents didn’t let me stay up school nights to watch Johnny Carson, who had Paul Ehrlich, author of the bestseller The Population Bomb, on The Tonight Show about 20 times.) Yet nobody else these days seems to remember the arguments that once struck America’s influential classes as persuasive.
Sure, the doomsayers’ prophecies were overblown, but the notion that moderation in the size of the population has its advantages has hardly been debunked. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom has simply flipped 180 degrees. That an increase in the quantity of residents isn’t an unalloyed good for Americans is now widely sneered at as some crackpot theory that only hippies on acid would countenance. Everybody knows that a bigger population is Good for the Economy.
In the current immigration debate (if we can call the coordinated marketing campaign we’re being subjected to a “debate”), we are told by Wall Street, academia, corporate shills, and the media that a stable population would be a dire fate. (Not that the US is in terrible danger of that: The number of inhabitants has grown by 34 million in this century.) Thus, illegal aliens are doing us a big favor by coming here to have the children they can’t afford to have in their own countries.
And yet the experts enlightening us about the wonders of a bigger populace don’t seem to be in any hurry for their own communities and colleges to grow. From checking the statistics of elite institutions, you might almost get the impression that the “revealed preference” of people who are good at getting what they want is for very slow population growth. ...
"While it’s fun to point out the hypocrisy of the most successful, it’s also worth noting that maybe they are on to something in their desire for quality over quantity in people. But that’s the last thing we’re supposed to think about it when it comes to immigration policy."Excellent. It made perfect quality-of-life sense for the U.S. population to have started to level off around the year 2,000, but by then our hostile ruling elites were merrily flooding us with our high-fertility racial replacements. As I write this, looking at the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Clock, rounding off to the nearest 100,000: U.S. 315,400,000/World 7, 069, 100,000. According to the World Bank, the earth's population is now growing at about 200,000 per day.
People can quibble over exactly what all this means, but by any reasonably sane environmental or orderly quality-of life societal measure, that constitutes overpopulation. And yet for decades we have had a constant drumbeat in the media that the very idea of overpopulation has been totally 'discredited,' and that the planet's population is just about to level off and then start plunging. But then why the urgent campaign to sell the idea? Just let the world's population level off and begin to drop and there will be your proof! It isn't as if Mexicans, Muslims, Chinese, Indians, Nigerians or what have you are going to forget how to reproduce.
Seems that many of the same suspects who loudly claim that overpopulation is discredited are those who say that the idea of race is merely a 'social construct' and can't wait for a more wonderfully diverse and more populous Western civilization--no doubt as long as all this does not take place upon the quiet low-crime leafy streets where they comfortably reside. (Some liberals talk about overpopulation, but usually go comatose on endless massive in-migration.)
A few months back the popular science magazine Discover had a cover article devoted to how the idea of overpopulation was just so very laughably old-hat and wrongheaded. But I had to ask myself, keeping in mind the 315+ million and the 7+ billion figures, and the 200 thousand increase per day, why in the world would a science magazine turn the world's future alleged LACK of population, of all topics, into such a big story? But then I couldn't help noticing that the editor, now gone, had formerly been an editor at that towering institution of scientific objectivity, at least a couple of rungs above the Max Planck Institute, the New York Times. That brought to my face a knowing smile of painfully acquired wisdom.
One of the reasons coming to Taki's Magazine is often such a breath of fresh air is that I suspect that at this point I could buy a subscription to, say, Formica Tabletop Times, Foot Fetish Quarterly, Angus Cattle Yearly Roundup or the Recombinant Genetics News & Silicon Valley Shopper, open up the first issue, and I would immediately find myself being force-fed the same mandatory Cultural Marxist anti-Western narrative. Not saying it's a 'conspiracy,' but with relentless ubiquitous ruling elites like ours, who needs a conspiracy?
Seems that many of the same suspects who loudly claim that overpopulation is discredited are those who say that the idea of race is merely a 'social construct' and can't wait for a more wonderfully diverse and more populous Western civilization--no doubt as long as all this does not take place upon the quiet low-crime leafy streets where they comfortably reside. (Some liberals talk about overpopulation, but usually go comatose on endless massive in-migration.)
A few months back the popular science magazine Discover had a cover article devoted to how the idea of overpopulation was just so very laughably old-hat and wrongheaded. But I had to ask myself, keeping in mind the 315+ million and the 7+ billion figures, and the 200 thousand increase per day, why in the world would a science magazine turn the world's future alleged LACK of population, of all topics, into such a big story? But then I couldn't help noticing that the editor, now gone, had formerly been an editor at that towering institution of scientific objectivity, at least a couple of rungs above the Max Planck Institute, the New York Times. That brought to my face a knowing smile of painfully acquired wisdom.
One of the reasons coming to Taki's Magazine is often such a breath of fresh air is that I suspect that at this point I could buy a subscription to, say, Formica Tabletop Times, Foot Fetish Quarterly, Angus Cattle Yearly Roundup or the Recombinant Genetics News & Silicon Valley Shopper, open up the first issue, and I would immediately find myself being force-fed the same mandatory Cultural Marxist anti-Western narrative. Not saying it's a 'conspiracy,' but with relentless ubiquitous ruling elites like ours, who needs a conspiracy?
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