“Sharply More Americans Fail to Understand Immigration Built the U.S.”
Not just built, but it also underpins the American economy today. Like most industrialized nations, the USA has a negative replacement rate(fewer births than deaths). If immigration stops, at best, the USA slowly dies out. Long before that though our economy crumbles from the ground up.
So fewer people to handle all the menial tasks that noone wants to do?
Wonder what will happen if noone helps any longer in agriculture or infrastructure. Really curious.
Significantly more U.S. adults than a year ago, 55% versus 41%, would like to see immigration to the U.S. decreased.
Honestly, I’m only surprised this swing hasn’t been bigger. There are douchebag political hacks in both parties implicitly and explicitly pushing a ton of bullshit about needing to secure our border and immigrant crime and nonsense like that because it’s an election year and playing to Americans’ worst impulses is all they know how to do. Besides that, our federal government has been unbelievably awful at getting any kind of aid to the city and county governments who have been sheltering migrants the same federal government prevents from working, so all that a lot of voters see is stressed out mayors giving tense press conferences about budget crises and migrants standing in bread lines. If we wanted to build a perfect scenario to make Americans hate migrants we couldn’t have done much better.
Sharply…more?
Yes it went up pretty sharply from 2020 to 2023 rising from 28% to 41%, but went up even more sharply from 2023 to the present rising from 41% to 55%, 10% less than it’s all-time high in 1993 and just 3 points less than it’s dot com bubble fueled peak in 2001 of 58%.
It’s notable as generally in the US support or indifference for immigration has been high during periods of economic growth and low during recessions. But our economic data says we’re not in a recession. It implies that something has either changed with the drivers of American’s opinions on immigration or that the economic data is incorrect or incomplete.
As a canadian, our country brought in over 1 million imigrants in a year, but we didn’t really do anything to prepare the country for them. We didn’t ensure enough housing would be built to support them, we didn’t build any transit for people to get around cheaply, and we allow private schools to profit off selling them a sub-par education under false pretense.
The mass immigration has helped reveal some of the issues our country already had. Housing was already an issue before, now its even worse. The problem is many people didn’t see these problems building up and now blame the immigrants as the source of the housing crisis and employment issues.
I think it has potential to turn into a racially driven culture war and a significant amount of that sentiment could have been avoided if Canada was more thoughtful and planned the whole process better. I’ve got no problem with immigrants moving to Canada, but I want a country that can actually support them and give them the quality of life that was sold to them. Many immigrants feel lied to about the state of their schooling and the cost of living in Canada.
