Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs - Updated 2010

Immigration - Global humanitarian reasons for current U.S. immigration are tested in this updated version of immigration author and journalist Roy Beck's colorful presentation of data from the World Bank and U.S. Census Bureau. The 1996 version of this immigration gumballs presentation has been one of the most viewed immigration policy presentations on the internet.

Presented by immigration author/journalist Roy Beck

Learn More http://www.NumbersUSA.org
NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that favors an environmentally sustainable and economically just America and seeks to educate the public about the effects of high levels of immigration on U.S. overpopulation, the environment, jobs, and wages. We use government data to conduct research on the impacts of U.S. population growth, consumption, sprawl, and current levels of immigration and educate the public, opinion leaders and policy makers on the results of those and other studies.

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.