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The people coming in 110 years ago were much more similar to the native population than they are now.
Well, perhaps not so close to the native indians. But the citizenship population, yes... if you overlook the problems with the Irish, German and Finnish immigration waves.
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greater impact on American demographics 110 years ago then it has now
I will disagree. Back then we had a frontier. There was wilderness. Immigrants from Northern Europe came over with knowledge of how to survive farming crappy, frozen wastelands like Iowa and Minnesota that no one else wanted. And if they did a poor job, they went hungry and froze during the winter. They didn't add additional traffic to freeways. They didn't add to overcrowding in schools. That was back in the day when we were still building new cities on the frontier. Those days are now several centuries past.
When immigrants come here today, 50% of them settle in California, followed next by New York City. They are direct factors in overcrowding, leading to more freeway congestion, more students per classroom in already overcrowded schools, longer lines at hospital emergency rooms, cutting down forests and blacktopping over prairie land to build more suburb tract housing.
Starting with the 1970s Americans have overwhelmingly chosen on their own to reduce their birth rate to an all time low to try to stop overcrowding and save the environment. Americans see the results of overcrowding and want it to stop.
Immigration is the other half of the overpopulation equation. Americans choosing to reduce their own birth rate doesn't matter worth a shit if we're flying in over a million people per year to add to the population overload. If we want to not blacktop over the entire nation into a giant strip mall, we need to drastically reduce immigration to more sustainable levels as the second half of the overpopulation problem.
One only needs to look at California to see how far we're overstretched. 1/5 of the US population lives in California, a state with a dry season where it doesn't rain for five months straight every year. Water is a limited resource.
Whole rivers have now been ran dry to fulfill the water needs of the population growth it suffers. San Francisco and its suburbs divert
an entire river 160 miles away to sustain its population. There is no more water left. There are no more rivers
to divert. Whole species of fish are being made extinct, while entire rivers are nothing but the toilet water flushed from the next city upstream. The state currently eeks by day by day, but it's only a matter of time before a Katrina level disaster knocks it all apart.
No one denies California is overpopulated far beyond what is long term sustainable. No one denies that in earthquake country it's a disaster that's only a matter of when, not if. But here we are, still shoving in an extra 600,000 people every year because our politicians refuse to say no to more growth. So when the next natural disaster stresses the state's infrastructure, we'll be even more deep in the shit.