I remember, a few years back, driving through LA and listening to Michael Savage on the radio. He was declaring angrily that "the blacks and the browns" had never built a successful civilization, and that immigration from "black and brown" countries should therefore be halted.
Well, years later, here's my response to Michael Savage. A new Pew survey reveals that the richest religious group is...Hindus! Hindus, you may recall, are almost entirely "brown" people, and recent immigrants at that. If you think of America as a big competitive economic free-for-all, then brown people from an overwhelmingly poor country have shown up and handily defeated all other ethnic groups in a single generation. So much for Savage's theories.
But seeing the economy as a competition between ethnic groups is the whole problem with Savage's worldview, and with many Americans' attitudes in general. There is not a "lump sum of wealth" in the American economy, to be fought over by rival tribes. If so, we'd be getting poorer and poorer as our population increases. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of Malthusian death trap.
More immigrants means more specialization, more concentration of economic activity, and more new businesses. This is as true for low-skilled illegals from Mexico as it is for the Indian immigrants who own or run 40% of the startups in Silicon Valley; if you are skeptical that less skilled workers really add to a nation's wealth, just imagine a country populated only by math geniuses, and then think of half of those math geniuses building houses and mopping floors.
In other words, the more immigrants come here and work, the higher your standard of living will be. Think about this the next time you hear a conservative nutcase preach that our country is in danger of being overrun by "the blacks and the browns".
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