U.S. population growth bad for our fiscal health

By JIMMY A. DeFOOR

We are weapons of mass destruction. We are the suicide bombers hiding sure destruction under our clothing.

Collectively, we are the major terrorist threat that will destroy the American dream of an ever-better tomorrow even if we manage to not destroy the nation itself. The 60 million residents we will add during the next 21 years will certainly damage our quality of life and that damage will be lengthy and extensive. President Obama must recognize this and make the reduction of our population growth as significant a national priority as reducing our carbon emissions. In fact, reducing U.S. carbon emissions long-term necessitates that we control our population. No matter how much we slash the carbon emissions of each resident, we will always return to higher total emissions unless we control population.

Curtailing population growth also is as important to long-term U.S. fiscal health as fixing the economy and reforming health care. Our 60 million new residents will increase the population by 20 percent. Half will come from immigration. These new children and adults will demand at least a 20 percent increase in government services at all levels: trash dumps, water reservoirs, prisons, courts, police, schools, hospitals and highways. Furthermore, the additional expense won’t be evenly distributed.

More than 38 million of the new residents will be concentrated in six states: California, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

Texas will house 9 million by itself. Where will Texas put them? Will 3 million go along the coast so that they will be exposed to the hurricanes that enter the gulf? Will 2 million reside in Austin and San Antonio, where water shortages are now a way of life? Will we put 3 million in Dallas and Fort Worth, where roads are already overloaded and commute times are often an hour? Will the final million live near Lubbock and Amarillo and convert thousands of acres of our best cropland to housing and streets?

And what of the impact of population growth elsewhere? California, Arizona, Florida and Georgia are expected to add more than 26 million people. Florida’s 10 million will be exposed to frequent tropical storms across its width of 150 miles. California, Arizona and Georgia already lack sufficient water for their cities and their farms.

Where will they get the water needed for their 16 million additional people? We must take action now to restrict our population growth. We must reduce total immigration into the United States from its current 1 million to 1.5 million people per year to no more than 500,000 per year, which will be 200,000 more people than our annual emigration.

Illegal immigration

Given that almost half of our current immigration is illegal, we must adjust annual legal immigration to compensate for the illegal totals that are allowed each year. This means that if we allow 300,000 illegal residents each year, we can only allow 200,000 legal residents across all categories: refugee, family member and employee-sponsored.

We must strengthen efforts to limit illegal immigration by finding employers who hire undocumented workers and levying increasing fines for repeat offenses. We must start a national campaign to encourage families to limit their number of children to two. We must remove the tax subsidies for any children born after their first two siblings.

If we initiate these steps, we can lower U.S. population growth over the next 21 years from 60 million to only 20 million.

Last, we must begin to dedicate U.S. foreign aid primarily to those countries that will take action to reduce their birth rates. Already, nearly 1 billion people of the world’s 6.7 billion inhabitants are chronically hungry most days. Given that food shortages will only expand as the world’s population grows to 8.4 billion in 2030, we won’t have enough food to send to those countries that will not work hard to control their populations.

There are only so many seats on the lifeboat named Earth. We must reserve them for the people who will row to safety together.

X Jimmy A. DeFoor of Fort Worth, Texas, is a database program manager for a major credit card company. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.