No 700 million foreigners are not coming to take over America
by digby
Rand Paul has been pushing the ban on birthright citizen for his entire political career and now he's calling the rest of the pack Johnny-come-latelys. Dave Weigel caught up with him down in Haiti where he was donating his medical services to ask him about it. He said that if we sealed the border up tight it might not be necessary but otherwise we're going to have to change the constitution because of something unintelligible about the DREAMers.
Anyway, this was what I found interesting:
The issue of citizenship as a birthright is especially volatile in Haiti. In 2013, the Dominican Republic's Supreme Court ruled that anyone born in the country after 1929, who did not have at least one native-born Dominican parent, would be stripped of citizenship. The decision was largely seen as a way to get more than 250,000 Haitians to leave the country. An international outrage stalled action on the ruling for years, but deportations have begun -- and were taking place on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border just 45 minutes from the city where Paul was performing eye surgeries on poor people this week.
The argument in the DR, and in the United States, boiled down to this: Who deserved to be a citizen? According to Paul, there had to be reasonable limits, and it was better in the long run for countries to be stabilized than for their people to leave in search of work.
"Pew did a poll a while back, interviewing people in like 50 countries, and they came up with an estimate that if anybody could come to America, 700 million people would come," Paul said. "So we'd double, triple the population. You can’t probably exist with that kind of mass migration. For a country to be a country, it has to have borders. The answer isn’t to let Haiti to move to America. The answer is fixing Haiti. It's the same for a lot of countries."
That's just babble. 700 million people are not coming to America and there aren't very many people who are arguing for "open borders" in any case. Migration from Mexico and Central America to work has been happening since well ... forever. It's not an emergency. It's just a bunch of wingnuts being duped and distracted from the fact that they're being screwed by billionaires (like Trump and Koch.) A very old story in America.
But aside from that obvious point, surely Paul doesn't think that "fixing Haiti" is something that can be done without any help from the rest of the world, does he? Because this is the guy who wants to end all foreign aid. So essentially he's saying what Trump's saying: build a wall, get them out, keep them out, to hell with the rest of the world.
That tends not to work out very well.
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