Some people say that mass immigration into the United States
can help reduce world poverty.
Is that true?
Well, no its not and let me show you why.
This gumball represents the 1 million legal immigrants that the United States
has taken every year on average since 1990.
Now who in the world deserves our humanitarian compassion?
The World Bank has one measure of the desperately poor of the world.
They make less than $2 a day.
And how many people make less than $2 a day in the world?
We'll start with Africa.
In Africa alone there are 650 million people who make less than $2 a day,
650 million.
And in India another 890 million people are desperately poor.
China adds another 480 million people making less than $2 a day
and unfortunately the rest of Asia has a heartbreaking 810 million people who
the World Bank says make less than $2 a day.
And finally there's 105 million of Latin America's population that are desperately poor.
All total the World Bank says that there 3 billion people in the world,
3 billion people who are desperately poor making less than $2 a day.
That's 3 thousand gumballs
and every year we take a million and suggest that we've somehow made a
humanitarian difference.
Of course, we don't pull our immigrants from these desperately poor populations,do we?
These people are too poor, too sick, too disconnected to make it here as immigrants.
We tend to pull our immigrants out of the better off poor of the world
and Mexico tends to define the type of immigrant we bring here because the plurality of people
come here from Mexico and Mexico is poor.
How many people in the world live in countries that have average incomes lower than that of Mexico?
The World Bank tells us that that number is these 3 billion
plus another 2.6 billion people.
5.6 billion people in the world who live in countries with average incomes below that of Mexico.
That's 5,600 gumballs.
So what is it the elites are telling us? They're telling us when we take this 1 million immigrants
that we somehow or another are tackling world poverty
and we have to do it regardless of the effect on our unemployed, the working poor,
the most vulnerable members of our society.
Regardless of the effect on our natural resources.
Even if we went by the most radical proposals in Washington,
which are to actually double our immigration to 2 million a year,
which would totally overwhelm our physical, natural, and social infrastructure
we couldn't make a noticeable difference
and we may be really hurting the impoverished people of the world because
the million that we do take are among the most energetic, often the better educated, certainly the most
dissatisfied people that if they did not immigrate would be the agents for change to improve the lot of
all the people in these countries. The true heroes in the global humanitarian field are the people in these countries
who have the wherewithal to immigrate to another country but instead stay in their countries to apply their skills to help
their fellow countrymen.
Unfortunately, our immigration system tends to entice these very type of people to abandon their countrymen.
The impossibility of making even a dent is actually worse than it looks here
because last year when we took 1 million immigrants, these countries added births over deaths
80 million more people into the impoverished population.
And this year Congress is bringing in a million legal immigrants
and this year according to the United Nations these countries are expected to add another 80 million people
and next year you can be quite sure that Congress unless stopped by the American voters will bring in
another million immigrants and these countries unfortunately will be adding another 80 million people
into these impoverished nations.
We could take 5 million a year but we'd never get ahead of what's happening in these countries.
Not in this century.
Don't you see? Immigration can never be an effective or significant way to deal with the suffering people of the world.
They have to be helped where they live.
99.9% of them will never be able to immigrate to a rich country. There's no hope for that.
They have to bloom where they're planted; the only place that 99.9% of these people can be helped
is where they live. Let's help them there.