And these older people tend to collect more Medicare, too.
Although the notion that workers’ FICA payments fund SS and Medicare is wrong, it’s commonly believed, so why the common antipathy to immigration?
Some would say that immigrants take jobs from citizens, but clearly that is not the case.
If it were, we wouldn’t worry about SS and Medicare losing funding because we lack FICA payments.
Undocumented mmigrants pay FICA, and the more young immigrants (the vast majority are young), the more FICA is collected.
Further, being young, they use less Social Security and less Medicare than the average American.
It’s not the lack of documentation that bothers Americans.
Much of the problem is the vast misinformation being spread by the right-wing “news” media.
They claim immigrants are criminals, rapists, murderers, lazy, non-working takers, etc. — i.e. generally lawless people whose very presence ruins neighborhoods.
None of it is true.
Statistically, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
And they surely are not lazy. They take the meanest, toughest jobs native-born Americans refuse.
Immigrants are less prone to committing crimes than are U.S. citizens, and they do pay taxes.
They take back-breaking jobs U.S. citizens don’t want, and their buying increases consumer demand, which in turn increases the number of available jobs in America, lowering our unemployment rate.
So why are they despised by some, especially by Republicans?
Like all dictators, Donald Trump needs scapegoats. Hitler had Jews. Trump has immigrants.
He has made the fear and loathing of immigrant families a fundamental part of the MAGA movement.
There even are Republicans who wish to unconstitutionally eliminate birthright citizenship and to deport “Dreamers,” children whose only crime was to have been brought to America undocumented.
Dreamers are the good young people America needs. Many know no other country than America and no language other than English.
But Trump has parlayed lies and fear into a distinctly unAmerican bigoted mass hatred of brown-skinned people.
To solve the self-made “crisis,” we must acknowledge several things.
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- Immigrants are people. They are men, women, and children desperate for a better life. They have made an often dangerous, often fatal, journey, willing to work for America just to flee the crime, corruption, and hatred in their native lands. In this way, they resemble our own ancestors, who came here to escape the poverty and bigotry of Europe and Asia and contributed to building America.
- The difference is that our ancestors were welcomed across the border, while today, we try to close the border. It’s not as though America is too crowded for them. We have plenty of room. It’s because we have forgotten our roots and now have adopted an “I’ve not mine; to hell with you,” unAmerican attitude stirred up by a hate-mongering, Hitlerian psychopath.
- Immigrants risk the dangers of illegal immigration simply because we have made legal immigration so difficult. We spend money on walls and guards rather than spending the same money on prompt and legal hearings to admit the good people and reject only the bad. The poem inscribed on the statue of Liberty has been turned into a sad joke.
Today, most lawful means of entering the country take years because of overwhelmed immigration agencies, rising levels of global migration and a limit on the number of certain visas, all of which have culminated in a massive backlog of people trying to get to the U.S.
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- Around 9 million people are awaiting green cards, and those wait times have skyrocketed from just a few months to years, possibly decades, according to the Cato Institute and other researchers.
- In 1991, only 3% of preference immigrants, or those seeking visas through family members already in the U.S., had to wait more than 10 years. By 2018, 27% of applicants experienced that wait time.
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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.
MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
Republicans are great at ingoring reality, and telling lies to create an “alternate” reality. The real problem is having so many people who will believe anything a Republican will say, while disbelieving anything a Democrat will ssy. The divide keeps getting wider and wider. Soon, even emergency surgery will not be able to heal that rift.
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Do you think they know the TFRs [Total Fertility Rates] for most of Latin America have also collapsed below replacement level? Even failed state Haiti is down in the 2.40-2.45 range. Tied for second highest is Guatemala and Bolivia right around 2.30. There are three or four more that have just dropped below the crucial 2.10 or are right on the cusp. I think Honduras is supposed to be 2.05 for this year. Mexico is already down in the 1.70-1.75 range and has been falling by 1-2% year after year since the late 1970’s. If the least developed big states Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero are subtracted from the Mexico data their TFR would be at 1.50 right next to Brazil whose population will likely peak in the next 10-12 years [barely growing now]. Down in the southern cone of South America there are areas where the TFR is down to 1.25-1.30 and the median age is fast approaching that in parts of Europe.
The wave of people at the border now could be the last big one. The pool of young desperate people to the south is drying up fast.
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Thanks for the info., but the pool of desperate young people is less related to population statistics than to crime and economics. If Brazil’s population was down to two people, one of them would try to come here for a better life.
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In the US data there can be can be TFR [1.6-1.7] variation whether those counted are only citizens or also the floating population of undocumented.
Many countries also fudge the final estimates they submit to various international organizations. Hence UN data is quite bad and way off. Demographers and statisticians can usually figure out with a reasonable degree of certainty what the actual situation is but it takes 2 or 3 threes of gathering and rechecking numbers. Even five years out things like the number of kids in kindergarten can really help to firm it up. Alternately WHO data on childhood vaccinations can help show if numbers are padded with an phantom sixth baby for every five that really exist.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S04YgDv9_x3dFs18Tl55SH-AiLUlvtkUcHUyMu0xUm8/edit estimates I got two weeks back from one researcher
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These charts show that the poorest & most troubled countries have the most children, which is what happens in poor vs. rich people WITHIN countries too. Poverty actually encourages people to have more children; this is an R strategy: have a lot of children and at least some will survive to help me in my old age because my country’s social safety net is bad or nonexistent. Also, when women have no access to birth control, they lose the ability to curtail baby-making. Most women in first world countries choose to have fewer children because they are K strategists: I’ll just have 1 or 2 children if any at all, because kids are expensive well into their young adulthood, and since they have their own expenses, and own children, I can’t count on them in my old age and my country has a social safety net that’s better.
So, curing poverty will mean fewer children, not more.
No, what we have to do is make much better use of the children/people we already have: better education, better opportunities & commensurate better pay, not paying rent-seekers the bulk of incomes through stock options, monopolies etc., better healthcare so people can be productive longer.
The new problem is that wealthy silicon valley types and industrialists now want to replace EVERYONE with AI and AI Robots. Both are advancing at unimaginable rates, self-generating new and better versions far faster than society can adjust to. Job losses are starting and it’s not clear new kinds of jobs will be available or that most displaced people can do them; it takes a special kind of brain to be an AI specialist and even the robot mechanics that we’ll always need are not the kinds of work everyone can do.
We might need a Universal Basic Income…but then we come back to what this blog is all about: can we envision a world of non-inflationary monetary sovereignty wherein money is created as needed, not just monopolized by a rent-seeking few for dubious claims on industry or services? If not, we’re going to have an increasingly unemployed, restless, angry mass, and a decreasing, fearful oligarchy hidden behind tall gates and security guards (that IS a job that’s increasing, but what happens when those guards revolt themselves?).
We need to figure this out, and soon.
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In 2019, Yi Fuxian MD a demographer and OB/GYN researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison claimed that China’s population had already started declining and had then a maximum total fertility rate (TFR) of only 1.1, when the official projections were still at 1.8. Yi was vindicated in 2022 when following a data leak Chinese authorities acknowledged that the fertility rate had fallen to as low as 1.0, far below replacement level. Furthermore, Yi has estimated that China’s population is only 1.28 billion, instead of the 1.41 billion the government claims. https://www.project-syndicate.org/columnist/yi-fuxian
The phantom 130 million are young people under 35 who were never born. So the median age of the population is quite a bit older than they let on and the potential pool of youthful conscripts for any big war quite constrained.
The talking heads on CNBC will sure be surprised if one day with little to no notice circling the drain for a while now China loudly cracks and begins to implode at all levels.
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While Trump instills xenophobia into his MAGA base, and threatens to deport a million (or is his latest number ten million?) undocumented immigrants, mostly young, hard-working, honest people. Do I hear the sound of the Trump’s Gestapo kicking down doors?
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The scapegoats bit reminds me of case study in recent history: Kyiv. In 2019, Zelensky contracted with “C14” a far right nazi group to police kyiv! Naturally, they started attacking soft small minorities to justify their “contract”. Few years later, now they threaten nearly EVERY peace activist within the capital trying to end this dirty war which makes Pashinsky and other similar arms merchants very very wealthy. Maga Starts with something, but it really earns it keep later when the puppeteers need their services.
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Strange bedfellows? Zelensky, a Jew, hires nazis? If that were in a novel, it would be laughable. See: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/03/01/zelenskys-family-and-career/
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