“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe,” warned Thomas Jefferson more than two centuries ago. Anyone taking this seriously will find troubling that certain prominent Americans, such as commentator Glenn Beck, have supported the expansion of the U.S.’s population to one billion people via continued immigration. And one person who is taking this very seriously is Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
On Tuesday night, Carlson opened his show pointing out that our biggest problems generally get the least attention and are thus allowed to fester. And here’s a big one: With the United States’s fertility rate below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) at 1.781, native-born Americans’ numbers are shrinking. Yet our population continues growing for one — and only one — reason: (im)migration.
What’s more, with immigrationists holding political and cultural sway, there’s impetus not to halt or reduce our human imports, but increase them.
Carlson introduced the issue thus:
The size of your population matters very much. The size determines a nation’s character. It often determines its fate…. The United States is growing faster than most Americans understand. If you were born in 1969 … you arrived in a country with a little over 200 million people in it. There are now 334 million people in it. That’s an awful lot of new people in an awfully short time. How many people is that exactly? Well, it’s nearly twice the population of the entire western United States. That’s 13 states, including California. That is massive and incredibly rapid demographic growth, and it’s accelerating.
Immigration is now at the highest level ever recorded in American history. So is the number of foreign-born already living here. Over just the last year, roughly two million people from the Third World came across our borders illegally. All of them arrived with the blessing of the White House. It makes you wonder what sort of economy Joe Biden imagines we’re going to have going forward. Domestic manufacturing is in steep decline, automation is replacing many of the low-skilled jobs that still remain. So what are these millions of new people going to be doing for work 20 years from now? They can’t all be Nancy Pelosi’s housekeepers. They can’t all bus tables at the French Laundry in Napa.
The irony is that the immigrationist Left once claimed to care about “overpopulation” and its strain on resources. Yet a simple reality, the 600-pound demographic gorilla in the center of the room, is now rarely discussed: If current immigration trends continue, our 334 million population will become 500 million.
Then 800 million.
Then one billion — and beyond.
In fact, figures ranging from Matt Yglesias to Glenn Beck have proposed stoking immigration further to reach the latter number (to, their theory goes, “compete” with China). We seldom ask, however, how many people are too many, notes Carlson.
Statist politicians won’t ask because more “bodies in a country mean more power for the people who run it,” the commentator also stated. “Big nations need big governments.” He then warned:
That’s bad news for the rest of us. First, and most obviously, big governments don’t treat their citizens very well…. The larger a bureaucracy becomes, the more impersonal it gets. Past a certain size, organizations of any kind lose their regard for people. As they get bigger, they get blunter, more soulless and cruel. The people in charge no longer care what you think. They don’t have to worry about how their policies will affect you or your family. And that’s the inevitable product of population growth. If you had five children, you would bathe them all in love and attention. If you had 5,000 children, you wouldn’t know their names.
Carlson’s quotable last line should become a mantra. For many commentators have discussed our (im)migration’s qualitative nature — i.e., 85 to 90 percent of our post-1967 (im)migrants have hailed from the Third World, and 70 to 90 percent of them have historically voted for statists (Democrats) upon naturalization. But quantity matters, too.
Harking back to Jefferson’s warning, is it a coincidence that our big cities are Democrat bastions, rural areas are heavily Republican, and suburbs are somewhere in-between? Sure, much of this has to do with large metropolises often being heavily black/Asian-descent/Hispanic and the countryside being primarily white (and the suburbs being a mixture) and those groups’ voting, respectively, mainly Democrat and mainly Republican — but not all of it. For example, Salt Lake City, Utah, is almost 66 percent non-Hispanic white but voted heavily Democrat in the last election.
The reality is that overcrowding is unhealthful. Consider ethologist John B. Calhoun’s 20th-century experiments in which mice were forced to live in limited space, but were provided ample food and freedom from disease and predation. Breeding led to overcrowding and, ultimately, the kinds of social ills plaguing our big cities: greater aggression among dominant males; homosexuality; “absentee fatherhood” that forced females to fend for themselves; “child abuse”; and, eventually, anti-social behavior, self-absorption, and narcissism and an associated decline in fertility (and then extinction).
While we must extrapolate animal studies to people with caution — man has a spiritual dimension as well — we’re also of the flesh and subject to many of nature’s rules. Thus does the above amount to a cautionary tale.
Then there’s what I call The Phenomenon of the Bathroom. If you live alone, your bathroom is always available; if you have one roommate, it will occasionally be occupied when you want it, but not usually. But what if you live with 10 other people in the same apartment?
The bathroom will rarely be free; what’s more, some people will be inconsiderate (not self-governing) and monopolize it. This will lead to the regulation of the bathroom and perhaps penalties for rule-breakers. This is a metaphor, of course, for how overcrowding begets big government.
As for Carlson (his video segment is below), he also made a point summed up well by a Herb Stein paraphrase: “If something can’t go on, it won’t.” Our immigrationist-born system, along with our moral decay, are, to use a fashionable term, unsustainable. Either we collapse them — or they’ll collapse us.
Montana has far less government and more freedom than Germany. Could this partially be because, while the two are roughly the same size, Montana has one million people and Germany 83 million?
Of course, though, statist politicians who know that densely populated big cities will empower them will want America to be Gotham coast to coast.
