The View from Planet Economist

The British newsweekly The Economist prides itself on being the smart news source for the global overclass. (It calls its new lifestyle advice spin-off magazine Intelligent Life.) But, The Economist sure can be dumb about immigration. A reader sends me this excerpt from its article "The Americano Dream:"

AMERICA is going through one of its periodic bursts of high immigration. According to the Census Bureau, the country is home to about 34m people born abroad, half as many again as ten years ago. It is also going through one of its periodic panics about the subject.…

But, as seen from Planet Economist, there's nothing to worry about:

"New arrivals [i.e., immigrants] tend to head for New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and other cities. Over half the immigrants first settle in one of these gateways, and two-thirds of the foreign-born population live in states surrounding them... As it happens, these preferences are extremely fortunate for America as a whole, because the melting pots are precisely the places that domestic migrants have been leaving in droves."

Apparently, The Economist believes the reason that millions of native-born Americans have fled the coast of California over the last dozen years is because they suddenly grew tired of year-round sunshine, mild temperatures, low humidity, and no mosquitoes. Their leaving couldn't possibly have anything to do with immigration. Thank God for all these immigrants doing us a huge favor by moving into the Golden State, or otherwise Los Angeles and San Francisco would be unpopulated wastelands that looked like a neutron bomb had hit them.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer