That's my provocative statement pointing out the hypocrisy of right to lifers that want to put walls at our borders and possibly send people back to the gang violence and deadly situations where they came from.
It's true that more people want to come to the US than are legally allowed by our outdated immigration quotas. Seems like our quotas, for legal immigration, were created when there were less people in the world. Less people to be knocking at our doors.
In recent years, Congress has been pretty gridlocked about updating things like the immigration quotas. Updating to better reflect not only world population, but also the number of people working in our economy. Many of the undocumented immigrants are a vital part of today's economy, so I hear.
While people talk about immigrants taking jobs, it seems like the bigger problem is housing. The economy tends to expand as more people, more consumers, more workers arrive. A bigger problem is the amount of affordable housing near our metropolitan areas where most of the jobs are and most of the people need to live.
We need to keep looking at the big picture. How many people are migrating around the world, including people coming to the US? How are we planning for our population?
Maybe we can't expect to have as much free parking as we had in the past since that takes up too much space in our growing metro areas.
We need to evolve toward things like denser development, lower footprint living, better transit and more walk able neighborhoods. It all interconnects and we need to talk about the big picture story. How best to accommodate people living on this planet and how many people are living on this planet. Family planning is a big part of the picture also.
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