It's official: as Director of NumbersUSA's Media Standards Project, I can reveal that The New York Times is one of the nominees for my Most Intellectually Dishonest Newspaper In America Award. (Competition is fierce!)
The Times spins half-truths, omissions and factual errors into editorials and stories that support its fantasy interpretation of the National Question. Not even the supermarket rag The Globe can match the Times for distortion.
I have criticized the Times before and could easily rake it over the coals every day. But out of respect for VDARE.COM reader's appetite for variety, I limit myself to only the most egregious outrages.
Accordingly, today we'll take a hard look at the Times' annual Ain't-All-This-Population-Growth-Grand editorial. But before pressing on to the main event, let me first remove one burr that has been stuck in my saddle for a while.
Last fall, the Times published, "A September 11 Reading List." The list recommended 30 books that deal with the events of 9/11 and the related subjects of terrorism, Islam and Afghanistan. Times reporters wrote five (5) of the books.
Conspicuously missing from the list: Michelle Malkin's, Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.
Michelle's book, well reviewed on Amazon.com and praised on numerous talk radio programs [VDARE.COM note: and by Peter Brimelow!], spent several weeks on the New York Times best-seller non-fiction list and reached #14. But it was not reviewed by the Times – and that omission was not repaired in its 9/11 roundup. The only explanation for this snub: the aforementioned intellectual dishonesty of the Times. The Gray Lady doesn't permit other voices with differing views.
That's important, because the Times sets the national media agenda. No other major newspaper reviewed Invasion either.
Now unburdened, I can turn my attention to today's business: the Times' March 17th editorial titled "Humanity's Slowing Growth."
According to a recent United Nations report, population growth rates are dropping dramatically round the world. The U.S. is the only developed country whose population will rise over the next decades—and it will rise dramatically.
The Times uses the U.N study as a vehicle to chide Paul Ehrlich and his work, The Population Bomb. Smaller family size is the main reason that population will level off and then decline in developed countries like Japan and Italy.
Then the Times, referencing the U.N. study, writes that America's population "is projected to be 409 million in 2050 up from 285 million today." It must not have checked the Population Clock on www.census.gov. By the time you read this, the U.S. population will be close to 291 million. This major oversight came despite the fact that the Times has an editorial page staff of 30 writers, editors and columnists.
How, according to the Times, will our population get to 409 million? America will become one of only eight countries that will account for half the global population growth in the next fifty years because of:
"…a higher fertility rate and immigration…"
This is blatantly misleading. An accurate way to account for an additional 118 million people who will inhabit America by 2050 would be to write as follows:
"…high annual levels of legal immigration and an equally high annual illegal alien influx boosted by a high fertility rate among those immigrants and aliens…"
I don't want to weigh this essay down with statistics that VDARE. COM readers are intimately familiar with. But just to provide some prospective: the U.S. currently takes in about one million legal immigrants annually and looks the other way at another one million illegal aliens. And about 750,000 births occur annually to mothers born outside of the U.S.
From the illegal immigration total one has to deduct deportations, out migration and deaths. That's roughly 350,000 people. So the U.S population adds approximately 2.4 million people every year directly because of immigration.
The Times winked at the role of fertility levels in population growth. But Latinos, heavily immigrants or recent immigrants, have larger numbers of children per family—about 3—than non-Hispanic whites or African-American—about 2. Again, more proof that immigration fuels population growth.
You think a future in 2050 that includes 40% more people in your community might be…unpleasant? You just don't have the big New York Times picture.
According to the Times, this mushrooming growth:
"…will improve our economic prospects."
The Times offered up an incoherent explanation of how things will be better citing the usual suspects—the aging domestic population will need the new workers to fund the health care needs for longer-living citizens, blah, blah, blah.
In fact, of course, the consensus among labor economists, as established by the National Research Council's 1997 report The New Americans, is that immigration does not add significantly to Americans' wealth – and is a significant cost in some states, because of transfer payments like education, emergency room care and welfare.
And don't be so naïve as to think that if things get better in the Third World, immigration might slow down.
The Times has this warning for you:
"No matter how much progress is made, there will be large population shifts to better-off nations. The immigrants will need the jobs and the richer countries will need the workers. So increasing the orderly, legal migration of labor from poorer to richer countries in the next few decades is a global imperative. Those who oppose this trend [i.e. VDARE.COM] will be embracing economic suicide."
There you have it—as plain as day! Immigration is nothing less than a global imperative! We are doomed to more immigration no matter what happens.
By the way, the other seven countries joining the U.S. in exploding populations between now and 2050 are: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Congo.
The Times had no comment on the company that we're keeping.
Joe Guzzardi [email him], an instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School, has been writing a weekly newspaper column since 1988. This column is exclusive to VDARE.COM.
