"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The US is still very sparsly populated, especially for a country with so much arable land & relatively mild climate.
Ever been to the Netherlands or Belgium? They are quite lovely. Both also have a population density well in excess of 10x the US's.
Lots more people can fit in the country without negative effects.
But the areas that have seen job growth in the last 20 years are highly concentrated in areas that are about as packed as most of Western Europe: LA, SF, Boston through DC, and about a dozen other massive metro areas. The vast majority of available land (from the Mississippi to the Pacific and Alaska) is uninhabitable or agricultural and without jobs.
All I know is that where I live we already have way too much traffic, lack of affordable housing, and the lowest labor participation rate in decades. So by what metric does increasing population help those of us who live here (besides companies who love cheaper labor)?
So by what metric does increasing population
help those of us who live here
areas that are about as packed as most of
Western Europe: LA, SF, Boston through DC,
and about a dozen other massive metro areas.
The US is sparse in any meaningful metric.
Also this part is important: "yearning to breathe free" is quite different from "yearning to establish a global Caliphate".
There's a big spectrum of behavior towards a political outcome between "opposed with deadly force" and "supportive with deadly force". Most Germans in 1940 wouldn't personally gun down Jews, nor even directly participate in organizing such a thing. But nor did they didn't oppose it with force, or energetically ensure it didn't happen.
Of course most Muslims aren't "scheming" to establish a caliphate, but they wouldn't oppose it the way you or I would.
This is an obvious reality that people just don't like to acknowledge.
They are for the vast, overwhelming majorly part, just normal people not unlike natives of the same social class. yes, if you compare the "typical" working class muslim to professional yuppies they come across a lot more conservative but not more so than the local-western working class.
And the muslim professional class (the doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc among them) are similarly not very different in this aspect from the local-western professional yuppies.
I think the discrepancy in perspective is that most yuppies don't otherwise notice the native working class.
They will always be cheaper than US labor. And there are other advantages like employer loyalty because they cannot easily change job, which means employers can push them very hard and they won't quit - because its complicated to shift to another employer and they have to restart their green card.
I think behind all this is the feeling that the best opportunities are given to foreigners who then rise up the ranks, opportunities which could have been given to Americans.
Regarding immigration in general, the left continuously argues to keep low-paid foreign workers here to the benefit of large corporates. The justifications of "all of Silicon Valley companies support foreign immigration" makes perfect sense for these companies, but not for the nation. Silicon Valley is a bubble.