A Modest Proposal Regarding Immigration and Common Good
Zack Booth Simpson
23 May 2006
With the upsurge in news regarding immigrants entering into the country taking away jobs and acting as a drain on societal resources, I can't help but compare these immigrants to another group of people whose societal impact is greatly more draining and who are, in fact, vastly more common. Indeed, for every migrant who enters into this country each year, there's four of this onerous group entering. The fact that the biased media and politicians talk endlessly about the negative impact of immigrants while never mentioning the incredible societal burden imposed by every member of this population is scandalous!
This burdensome group is known as "children". While they enter the country legally, without exception they consume vastly more resources than they contribute in both taxes and labor, usually for decades. When they are ultimately forced to enter the workforce (usually against their will) after years of societal coddling (including free food, free education, free health care, and even free entertainment) they almost always do so at labor rates substantially below average -- thus depressing salaries for hard working adults with whom they directly compete. Incredibly, some of these children (we'll call them "welfare-babies") sponge off of their sponsors for their entire lives and, to add insult to injury, steal all their sponsors' money after death in the form of so-called "inheritance"!
As a society we must face the fact that protecting our jobs by sealing the borders while simultaneously permitting children to consume vast resources without paying taxes and depressing the labor rates is like worrying about a hole in a garden hose while it's raining. Clearly before tackling the lesser problem of immigration, we must first address the enormous child problem. Thus, I have a modest proposal on which we must act swiftly.
Congress should proceed immediately to prohibit the entry of children into the country and deport all the ones currently here to whence they came. There are some (to be fair, mostly women) who think that this deportation will be problematic due to bottlenecks in the ports of entry; but, let's be honest -- almost no one has had the courage to seriously try.
Perhaps you think that worrying about the number of children inundating the economy is over-stated; after all, you note, children must have been entering the economy for, well, at least a generation, and counter-intuitively our society is seemingly better off now than it has been in millennia measured by any metric you choose. Any measurement, that is, except one: each person's relative share of the gross product. How proud each plebian of Rome must have been knowing that their daily toil amounted to a very significant fraction of the total work done. Sure, in modern times an average citizen of a rich industrial country can expect to live three times longer than did an average Roman, and sure they can reasonably expect to live without hunger and without pain from uncountable crippling illnesses among many other conveniences, but nevertheless, we are despondent with the knowledge that each of our relative contributions to society is a mere tiny fraction of those of our ancestors!
It is true that there are a few hopelessly naive romantics who maintain the illusion that it isn't their relative share of gross contributions which brings them joy but rather their absolute contributions. These happy, delusional people might be under the impression that helping to cure 2000 sick people today is a more worthy contribution to humanity than would have been helping to cure 1 sick person millennia ago when the population was a 2000th of today's. If you are one of these lucky simpletons who can delude themselves into maintaining such an illusion then you might well also conclude that the influx of children really has no impact at all on your quality of life. Quite the contrary, you might believe, the more hands and brains there are, the more investments can be made to improve every aspect of our civilization. If you were to hold this innocent belief (and I must admit to sometimes envying your happy, simple views), then you would also have to deduce that the influx of immigrants, who unlike children, become productive contributors immediately upon arrival (even if they do so illegally) are even less of a drain on society than are children. Finally, you would have no logical recourse but to conclude that immigration is actually a good thing, helping everyone to make their maximum absolute contributions for a better world. Come on, it can't be that simple.