The Five Billion

Steve Sailer:

The Bush Administration officials announced in January 2004 that the President's guest worker plan will allow anyone in the world with a minimum wage job offer from an American employer to move here, and bring along dependents. Contemplating this, it struck me (among other things) that our leaders must be clueless about how many people actually might want to move to the U.S...

In fact, we have several pieces of evidence about what such an open borders plan might bring.

1. The U.S. maintains an open border with its territory of Puerto Rico. One-fourth of all Puerto Ricans live on the U.S. mainland, according to Harvard economist George Borjas, and that proportion is kept down only by paying generous benefits to Puerto Ricans who stay home.

2. There are currently 106 million people in Mexico and approximately 25 million people of Mexican descent in the United States. In other words, just under 1/5th of all Mexicans in the world now live in America. And they got here without an official open borders plan.

So what does that imply?

There are currently over six billion people who live neither in America nor Mexico. So, if one-fourth of the rest wanted to move to America, as happened with Puerto Ricans, that would be 1.5 additional billion people, compared to the current American population of 296 million.

If only one-sixth wished to immigrate, that would be a mere one billion people.

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