In a recent speech, President Joe Biden denounced, among others, India and Japan as xenophobic for restricting immigration into their countries and further blamed this for their economies underperforming.
Aside from the impropriety of insulting U.S. allies, Biden is contending that nations restrict immigration based solely upon prejudice and for no other good reason.
Never mind, for instance, that India possesses the world's largest population with over 1.4 billion people, and taking in even more seems rather an imposition. Or that Japanese citizens already enjoy among the highest living standards in the world — a fact frequently remarked upon by even American tourists who rave about Japan's safe, clean streets and advanced technology.
No, in Biden's telling there can be no other possible explanation why countries would deny themselves all the economic enrichments they could otherwise be receiving if only they opened wide the immigration floodgates.
While this is undoubtedly self-serving given Biden's own open border policies, it has also become an article of faith for many Western policymakers today that immigration is everywhere and always an unqualified economic benefit that more than compensates for any pesky short-term downsides suffered by natives.
Curiously, however, Americans do not appear to share this sentiment, with polling showing strong disapproval of Biden's immigration policies.
Indeed, Americans are now even supportive of reversing them entirely, favoring mass deportations for those in the country illegally, along with far less immigration generally.
India and Japan may, therefore, rightfully ask why they should take in more immigrants, when Americans are not so keen on it themselves.
Perhaps Americans, too, are simply intolerant, India and Japan may sarcastically muse.
And while lauding his immigration policies for driving U.S. economic growth and lowering inflation, Biden has taken to chastising his fellow citizens for not appreciating it, as if they do not know what is good for them!
Though it is not only Americans who are now questioning whether mass immigration is truly the great economic bargain that Biden and others like him profess it to be.
And at the risk of being declared xenophobic themselves, other Western countries currently inundated by mass immigration are coming to the opposite conclusion.
In Britain, for example, a recent report conducted by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) concluded that mass immigration into the country was not only falling well short of its economic promises, but proving to be far more of a detriment.
As one author of the report summed up the findings: "Traditionally, the Treasury and much of the rest of Government have modelled immigration as an unqualified benefit to the public purse. But this is not the case."
The generally pro-immigration publication The Economist also recently analyzed the economic impact of the current wave of mass immigration in Western countries on inflation, living standards, and government budgets and found that on all three accounts the effects were decidedly negative.
Echoing the British CPS report, The Economist discovered that far from lowering inflation, mass immigration had exacerbated it across the Western world — especially regarding housing — while at the same time decreasing living standards, with gross domestic product per person falling and causing public services like social welfare programs and infrastructure to burst at the seams.
This certainly aligns with the lived experiences of many Americans, who like their Western counterparts are struggling with the affordability of staples like housing while their own pay fails to keep pace — a fact perversely enough celebrated by some economists, including the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who recently credited mass immigration for suppressing U.S. wages.
Likewise, Americans have seen their public services stretched to the breaking point, with cities like New York and Chicago straining mightily to accommodate the onslaught of new arrivals.
Of course, pro-immigration evangelists, like Biden, may dismiss this all as merely a temporary disruption and proclaim that the long-term economic benefits will eventually prove bounteous.
Though this provides little solace to those citizens whose standards of living are presently degraded because of it.
Americans may also wish to know when their short-term sacrifices will end and mass immigration can finally subside.
The answer from proponents like Biden appears to be never.
Indeed, they assert that not only is mass immigration an economic panacea, but that America is now completely dependent upon it and that without it the U.S. economy will collapse. After all, as one congressman posited, who will pick the vegetables? Vegetable picking apparently is among the things Americans are incapable of doing themselves or inventing machines that can.
Further, we are told that America will be rendered a depopulated wasteland in short order if millions of foreigners are not continually imported, as Americans, too, apparently can no longer sufficiently reproduce.
But this all begs the question, if a nation is wholly reliant upon the importation of millions of foreigners to simply function, is it even really a nation any longer?
Perhaps this is the real reason for India and Japan's immigration restrictions.
Lee Steinhauer is a strategic policy and political consultant known for his book "The Art of The New Cold War: America vs. China. What America Must Do to Win." Lee is a frequent guest on Fox, Fox Business, Newsmax, and a published policy and opinion writer for numerous media publications. Read Lee Steinhauer's Reports — More Here.
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