OpinionJournal - We Need More People

So says Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University. But she is totally incorrect.

Her principal assumption is that a decline in birth rates, and the graying of America, are permanent and irreversible. Inferring permanence from a temporary, but long-lived trend is an elementary scholarly mistake, and I am surprised at Prof. Glendon for making it. More likely, she resents being cheated out of a grant when she published a paper critical of anti-immigration sentiment, only to have an environmental foundation renege on a promise it had made to her.

True enough, many of the most radical environmentalists actually believe--incorrectly--that the only way to save the environment is to reduce the country's population, and drastically so. But Prof. Glendon is simply wrong to suggest, as she does, that the American people are taking that advice.

In the Election of 2004, we heard that Bush carried twenty-five of the twenty-six States having the highest fertility among "majority group" women--while John Kerry carried the fifteen States, plust the District of Columbia, that were dead last in this ranking. Now that implies a corollary: that conservatives are having more of the children. Even a liberal demographer has ruefully concluded that the liberals are going to lose elections in the future because they foolishly aborted away their electorate, while the conservatives continue to breed theirs. (Frequent readers will recall that I predicted a shooting war between our conservatives and those of Mexico and the Middle East.)

The point is that we do not need more people. We need merely to wait for the next generation of adults, reared in large families and with a large-family mindset, to step forward and assume their adult responsibilities.

And here is the danger that Prof. Glendon ignores: that the admission of up to 100 million Mexicans over the next twenty years represents the last best hope of liberals to win elections in America anymore. Prof. Glendon did call this straight-up: that a typical new immigrant is drafted into the latest victims' army of people demanding entitlements, reparations, and God knows what else from those of us who are Americans of the fourth or higher-order generations. The Democratic Party clearly understands this. The Republicans do not. All they understand is that they don't want to pay a high enough wage.

But not to miss the larger point: We don't need more people. We just need to roll up our sleeves, hire out our middle-school-age and high-school-age sons to mow our neighbors' lawns as they did in my day, stop going to trendy Los Angeles restaurants where a once-popular entertainer could get a rise out of the kitchen staff by shouting, "Immigracion!" (and probably still could), and support the efforts of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps as they quit waiting for the government to fence off our border, and do it themselves.