Let’s humanely reconsider immigration
President Biden promised to “restore the soul” of America. That, of course, means reviving the integrity and civility that were so often missing from the White House over the past four years.
But it requires more than that. America isn’t merely a country home to 330 million diverse humans. It’s a staggeringly gorgeous nation of rivers and mountains, plains and estuaries, forests and lakes teeming with wildlife. And in many regions, this biodiversity is disappearing due to the urban sprawl caused by our growing population.
If the new administration doesn’t curb population growth, it won’t be able to truly heal America, no matter how personally kind its members act.
America’s population has soared since President Biden and Vice President Harris began their respective political careers. From the time Biden won a Senate seat in 1972 to the time Harris triumphed in California’s attorney general race in 2010, the country gained 100 million more mouths to feed, clothe, house and educate.
In 1972, President Biden’s home state of Delaware reported approximately 573,000 residents. Delaware’s population sits at nearly 974,000 today. It’s the second smallest state in the union and has the sixth highest population density, with 480 people per square mile. California has gained nearly 3 million residents in the decade since Harris won her first statewide election.
This explosive growth has made urban sprawl inevitable, since all those newcomers need houses to live in, offices to work in and more roads to drive on. From 1982 until 2010, the United States lost 41.4 million areas of forests, prairies, seacoasts, cropland and more to development — an area roughly the size of Wisconsin.
Our spacious skies and amber waves of grain are not endless. Our water
supplies aren’t infinite, especially in the arid Southwest, where explosive population growth and worsening droughts have severely overburdened aquifers and reservoirs. Even in a country that spans a continent, we face resource constraints that will only worsen if the population continues to surge.
President Biden and Vice President Harris want to make Americans’ lives better. The pandemic and recession will make that job hard — but if sprawl continues unabated, that task will become virtually impossible. Our remaining open lands cannot be littered with “For Sale” signs. Our cities cannot accommodate more density, our roads do not need more traffic, our schools and hospitals do not need more demand.
Humanely rethinking our immigration policies would solve much of the problem — since population growth is almost entirely attributable to immigration. According to the Pew Research Center, 59 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1965 and 2015. If not for them and their descendants, there’d have been 72 million fewer American residents in 2015. Pew projects that from 2015 until 2065, immigration will account for 88% of all population growth.
Limiting future immigration is not about hating anyone — it’s about loving those already here. It makes no sense for state, local and federal governments to give resources to non-citizens while over 560,000 Americans are homeless. Nor does it make sense for authorities to tolerate businesses hiring and exploiting undocumented workers when so many Americans are jobless.
Scaling back immigration would ease pressure on our economy and our most vulnerable citizens. And preserving our open spaces would improve everyone’s quality of life.
Before planes take off, flight attendants always remind passengers that, in the event of an emergency, they should put on their own oxygen masks before assisting others. It’s good advice for travelers — and political leaders. It’s time to heal America first.