07/24/2008
There have been a number of complaints over the years about Peter Brimelow, who came to America from Lancashire by way of Canada, speaking about American immigration policy. Several of the reviews of Alien Nation include the words "an immigrant himself." His joke is that he’s an immigrant doing work that Americans don’t want to do.
Here’s a new twist — at an immigration policy conference in Canada, they imported an American — Steven Camarota of the Center For Immigration Studies — to explain the economics of immigration to them.
You can see video here, in which Camarota explains that one accounting trick that immigration enthusiasts use is to take the taxes paid by immigrants who work, subtract the welfare paid to immigrants who don’t, and if there’s a positive balance, claim that immigration is good economically.
But immigrants, by increasing the population, stress every form of infrastructure, roads, schools, medical care, policing — everything the government spends money on to do for citizens, it also does for immigrants.
For example, he mentions, now that now that Canada’s foreign-born population is 20 percent of the country’s population, it’s "hard to imagine" that they're not spending more on everything.
The conference was sponsored by Canada’s Fraser Institute, a free market think tank which has done some good work on immigration before. Watch the video here.
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