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http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/lamm0402.htm

We still control our future

By Alan Simpson, Richard D. Lamm and John Love April 2 - "You would be surprised at the number of years it took me to see clearly what some of the problems were which had to be solved ... Looking back, I think it was more difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them." - Charles Darwin

Demography is not destiny; it is a choice we make by our family size and through our immigration laws. The latest Census Bureau figures project a U.S. population by the end of this century of 571 million - more than double its current size. The Census Bureau's commentary on this phenomenal population increase is to treat it simply as an inevitability that has to be accommodated, rather than as the consequence of deliberate government policy. We think this is wrong. Americans deserve to know that a choice is being made. A policy decision so important to the future of America and to the peace and stability of our society should be carefully examined and thoroughly debated before it becomes a fait accompli.

Yes, it is sensitive; yes, America's immigration policy at times in the past has been marred by xenophobic and even racist sentiments. But there is something seriously amiss in our democracy when people can't discuss an issue so vital to their future. For most of human history, population growth was an asset. Some nations gave medals for large families; some still do. PreWorld War II Germany had many pro-natalist policies to encourage population growth; Mussolini turned off the lights in state-owned housing early in the evening so people would go to bed and conceive more Italians. "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth" had its counterpart in all the world's religions, and public policy followed. The larger a country's population, the stronger the country was assumed to be militarily, economically and geopolitically.

The benefits bestowed by a rapidly growing population were particularly apparent in newly founded nations with enormous tracts of unsettled lands like the United States, Canada, and Brazil. These nations faced the danger of occupation by unfriendly colonial empires as well as an acute scarcity of the labor needed to develop indigenous industries. For them, population growth was essential to survival.

Today is different. A man or a woman celebrating a 70th birthday in 2000 would have been alive while the human population of the earth tripled. That kind of explosion in the earth's population has not happened since Adam and Eve walked out of the Garden of Eden. This unprecedented population boom has had, and will have, repercussions for human society that we can scarcely imagine. The United States has not, and will not, escape its consequences. But we can, and we believe we should, mitigate its consequences.

Each of us saw California in the 1950s when there were approximately 10 million people living there. California had clean air, open space and was relatively uncrowded. It was often described as "paradise." But today, largely because of massive immigration, the state has 34 million people - and because immigration is accelerating, California expects to have approximately 50 million people by the year 2010. We have yet to meet a Californian who wants 50 million neighbors. Colorado has 4 million people and is rapidly heading to 5 million. Though few people in the West want more population growth, the West has the fastest growing population of any geographic region in the nation.

Surveys tell us that 500,000 Californians have abandoned California since 1990, frequently citing crime, gangs, congestion, pollution,immigration, earthquakes, fires and a generally diminished quality of life as their reasons for leaving. Will not the same problems befall states like Colorado and Wyoming if mass immigration continues? The velocity of change Because of immigration, America is changing both the size and ethnic makeup of its population with startling speed. Today one out of 10 Americans is foreignborn.

Counting legal immigrants, refugees, political-asylum seekers and illegal immigrants who settle permanently, the U.S. admits between 1.2 million and 1.4 million people a year. The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., estimates that 70 percent of U.S. population growth since 1970 is the result of immigrants and their U.S.-born children. We are not only changing our size but we are radically changing our ethnic composition in the process. Non-Hispanic whites are projected to go from 75 percent of our population today to 25 percent in 2100. America's famed melting pot worked in the past because years of intense immigration were followed by long periods of low immigration that facilitated assimilation, such as the 40-year stretch between 1925 and 1965. Today there are signs on every front that such an assimilation period is long overdue.

Our fastest growing group of immigrants, Hispanics, have the nation's highest school dropout rate - a reliable predictor of troubles to come. Should we not examine the wisdom of adding a second underclass to our country, which has not adequately solved the problems of its first underclass? Already, demographers are warning of the growing demographic divide between aging babyboomer populations in "heartland states" like Colorado and Wyoming and immigrantswollen "gateway cities" like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York. The wisdom and desirability of deliberately recasting America as a nation in which we are all minorities should be a subject of honest and open discussion.

Our explosive population growth and rapidly changing ethnic mix are due entirely to immigration. We have a choice. We can grow America's population from 276 million today to about 377 million by the middle of this century and stabilize it there, or we can double our size and probably double it again. The difference is a matter of public policy. If we do nothing to limit immigration, we will have effectively voted to leave our descendants an incredibly more crowded America. Is limiting immigration moral? The suggestion that we should reduce or limit immigration to the United States is often attacked on moral grounds. The proposition is that a policy that seeks to limit immigration is by definition antiimmigrant and therefore should be dismissed out of hand. But this facile and simplistic charge does not stand up to scrutiny.

Polls have consistently shown that a substantial majority of the American people - including all religious and ethnic groups - want less immigration. A Pew Research poll last fall found 72 percent of Americans in favor of reducing immigration. What is not revealed when these polls are released to the public is that the percentage of those who want less immigration increases as you move down the income scale.

This makes sense in view of the study by the National Academy of Sciences on the economic impact of immigration, which found that the adverse impact of immigration was greatest on low-skilled and low-income Americans - including disproportionate numbers of minorities. In contrast, the wealthiest Americans were seeing their wealth and lifestyles enhanced by large-scale immigration. What is moral about a government policy that is overwhelmingly unpopular and benefits its wealthy at the expense of its poor?

Of course, immigrants do gain greatly by moving to the United States. They immediately "own" a pro-rata share of the huge infrastructure of such public amenities as schools, libraries, roads, parks, hospitals, etc., that have been built by generations of Americans - a windfall that is hard to value. But when our moral obligation to help the rest of the world conflicts with our duty to help those closest to us, where does our loyalty belong?

We can and should do all we can to help less-fortunate countries around the world overcome their problems. But we should also hold them accountable for their own population choices. If a country like Egypt decides to expand its population and a country like Denmark decides not to, does that give Egyptians the moral right to occupy Denmark's less crowded territory?

Americans have chosen to limit their families and slow their population growth. Their collective decision to choose a less-crowded future for themselves and their posterity should not be trumped by moral posturing. And if we are truly concerned for the welfare of immigrants, shouldn't that concern begin with the ones we have already admitted? The National Academy of Sciences study identified recent immigrants as the group that was harmed the most economically and socially by continuing large-scale immigration. Key questions

In 1790, the first U.S. Census found 4 million Americans. Today, we are a highly advanced industrialized society of 276 million that requires tens of thousands of dollars just to create a job. As conditions change, so should our policy change. America must go back to the fundamentals of immigration policy, and ask the following questions: - Do we need more people in the United States? Is it desirable to have an America of 500 million people? A billion? Do we want Colorado's population to double or quadruple in size to 8 or 16 million?

- What is the impact of immigration on our labor market? Do we need more unskilled labor to run our economy?

- If we need skills, shouldn't we focus on educating or training our own people rather than importing foreign workers?

- What domestic problem will be improved by greatly expanding our immigrant population: Health? Education? Crime? Welfare?

- What moral obligation regarding immigration do we have to the world that overrides our obligation to our own poor and underprivileged and future generations of Americans?

- Is immigration policy reversing progress toward a fairer, more egalitarian society? Is our policy harmful to the interests of America's minorities? - Is massive immigration overwhelming our American melting pot and leading us toward an increasingly contentious and balkanized society?

The answers to these questions are crucial to America and Colorado's future. They deserve a far wider and more honest debate than they have received to date. It is not enough to merely point to the Statue of Liberty and mindlessly recite "We're a nation of immigrants: case closed." Our leaders must look honestly at the long-term impact of immigration and begin to give straight answers to the public's hard questions.

The size and future makeup of America is being quietly decided every day by our failure to enforce our laws against illegal immigration and our public policy on legal immigration. Do we want to add another 300 million to our population without debate? Will immigration leave Colorado a better place for our grandchildren to grow up? Alan SImpson was the chief Senate sponsor of the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform act while serving as a Republican U.S. Senator from Wyoming. Dick Lamm, a Democrat, and John Love, a Republican, are both former three-term governors of Colorado.

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This editorial represents the official opinion of The Denver Post as decided by the newspaper's editorial board.

-- K (infosurf@yahoo.com), August 23, 2000

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Could not find the post that K mentioned this earlier so will stick it here.

August 24 2000 FAR EAST

Chinese kill baby to enforce birth rule

FROM OLIVER AUGUST IN BEIJING

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CHINA has been shaken by one of the most horrifying cases of official infanticide in recent memory after family planners drowned a healthy baby in front of its parents. The actions of the officials in the village of Caidian, in the central Hubei province - carried out as part of China's one-child policy - caused a public outcry which forced the Hubei government to pledge that those responsible would be punished, a rarity in such cases.

The baby's mother, identified by Chinese newspapers as Mrs Liu, was expecting her fourth child. Couples in the countryside, where 70 per cent of China's people live, often have more than one child without punishment, despite the policy. But in Mrs Liu's case she was forcibly injected with a saline solution to induce labour and kill the child.

However, the baby was born healthy, to the surprise of family planning officials who had ordered the injection, which ordinarily destroys the infant's nervous system.

Immediately after the birth, they ordered the father to kill the child outside the hospital. He refused to obey but was so scared of further punishment that he left the crying baby behind in an office building, where it was found by a doctor shortly afterwards.

The doctor took the baby back to the hospital and reunited it with its mother. He removed the umbilical cord, administered vaccinations and then sent the family home.

Five officials were waiting for them in their living room. During the ensuing argument, the officials grabbed the baby, dragged it out of the house and drowned it in a paddy field in front of its parents.

Such was the public outcry in Hubei that people in Caidian contacted newspapers in the nearby metropolis of Wuhan on the Yangtze River. This led to national media attention which forced the Hubei government to pledge that it would punish the guilty officials.

Since its implementation in the early 1970s, the one-child policy has been dogged by allegations that family planning officials force those who break the rules into having abortions. The policy was introduced to ensure that China, a land historically beset by flood and famine, could feed all its people - now exceeding 1.1 billion - from a mere 7 per cent of the world's arable land.

Last month Zhang Weiqing, Beijing's Family Planning Minister, said he would not tolerate officials abusing women in order to achieve birth control targets. He said: "We have a strict policy. We deal with every violation by officials seriously." He was responding to media reports that in Nanhai, Guangdong, family planning officials held pregnant women in detention centres for violating the one-child policy.

The Government has recently restated its full commitment to the policy despite the abuses.The official Xinhua news agency commented: "Without taking effective measures to slow down the rapid growth of its population, China would have 300 million people more than the current figure."

A foreign demography expert said: "There are reports of people who have more than one child being beaten up, ostracised by the community and their houses demolished, but it is not condoned by the central government."

The doctor who tended the baby in Caidian said: "How could they be so cruel? The child could have been looked after in a children's welfare home. How could they do it?"

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 26, 2000.

http://www.the- times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/08/24/timfgnfar01001.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 26, 2000.