There is a popular video floating around Facebook called “Immigration Simplified Using Only Gumballs.” Each gumball represents one million people, and a man shows thousands of gumballs living on less than two dollars a day in jars labeled “China,” “India” and “Africa,” among others.
He explains that the one gumball of legal migrants the United States takes in each year does little to change the bleak picture of global poverty. Leaving young, talented potential immigrants to develop their native countries rather than admitting them to America is the more humanitarian decision in his view.
Even admitting two gumballs instead of one — the radical proposition from “Washington elites,” insulated from the harms inflicted by immigrants according to the man in the video — only manages to remove two drops instead of one from a bottomless bucket of third-world misery. He plucks two gumballs from “Africa” and places them in a wine glass representing the United States before adding eighty gumballs to “Africa” to account for the continent’s rapid population growth.
The process continues, two gumballs to “America,” eighty to “Africa,” over and over until the jar overflows and gumballs spill all over the stage floor. The audience murmurs in appreciation.
He concludes that mass immigration does no humanitarian good and needlessly drains our country’s resources.
Two demonstrably wrong premises support this presentation: that the humanitarian goal of immigration is to relieve world poverty, and that immigrants take more than they give back.
No serious immigration advocate argues that we can end poverty by moving every poor person to the United States.
Insofar as America has a humanitarian goal for its immigration policy, it is to unite families. According to the State Department, more than half of immigrant visas issued in 2016 went to the immediate family of an American citizen, with another third going to immigrants sponsored by green card holding family members in the United States.
The rest of the visas go to skilled workers, asylum-seekers and special cases, such as Iraqi and Afghani translators who work with the military.
The second point, that immigrants unfairly siphon resources from America, is entirely wrong. The center-right Cato Institute reports, “the economic effects of immigration are unambiguous and large.” The center-left Brookings Institute reports, “the total lifetime taxes (immigrants) and their descendants contribute exceed the benefits they receive.”
My family had little when we immigrated to the United States, but my parents were educated. They worked hard, paid taxes, sent their children to college and became important members of their church and community. This country is a better country for them having moved here — and they are not alone. The system prioritizes skilled, educated immigrants in a way that generally leads to success.
Despite immigrants’ massive boon to America, immigration policy is in desperate need of reform. Millions of undocumented immigrants participate in a massive, untaxed economy. Certain communities bear the brunt of strained schools and social services without benefiting from the additional tax revenue.
Solutions to these kinds of problems are dry, technocratic and more complicated than gumballs. In addition, they are impossible in the toxic anti-immigrant culture the Tea Party, and more recently President Donald Trump, has unleashed on the right.
The immigration debate has devolved into two questions: how tragic is the refugee crisis? How scary is ISIS? These questions cannot inform policy any more than how hungry one feels can inform a grocery list.
Determining how to exclude the scourge of international terror, how America can leverage its resources to ease the largest refugee crisis since World War II and how to enact law and order with kindness and decency is complex and difficult.
It is much easier to be rash and frightened and call for bans or walls. But so long as these questions are simplified to gumballs, we will continue to get them wrong.
Danny Bugingo can be reached at [email protected]
Duane
For all of those in favor of opening the borders. Let me ask you a question. If you are so giving, how much of your actual money, not taxpayer money, have you given to these poor nations. How much of your valuable time have you given. Have you ever thought of lending you finances and your labor to assist and educate those who need help. Immigration is not the answer. Helping others where others need help is the only way to help raise them from the situation they are in. I encourage you to participate in a mission be part of a solution. Teach someone to be better so they can help others.
Robert Gilford
I would tend to agree with your analysis. The "gumball" representation is an accurate assessment of how futile it is to allow immigrants to willy-nilly enter the United States. The two ridiculous premises fabricated by the author of this article (that the humanitarian goal of immigration is to relieve world poverty, and that immigrants take more than they give back) to complete nonsense. If the US is not trying to combat world poverty with their immigration policy, then why allow anyone into the country. Some immigrants give back more that they take, some take more than they give back. ANY immigrant in the US illegally is a taker, and not a giver. The US immigration policy IS NOT to unite families. Never has been. If families want to be united, stay together in your home country. The pathetically few immigrants that enter the US each year benefit, while the hundreds of millions they leave behind suffer because the US does not have the resources left to help the other countries. Danny's essay is interesting, but he discounts the mathematical facts that the US immigration policy does not, in any way, shape or form, help other countries in the least. Those countries have to do it themselves, with help from industrialized nations, and it has to be done in their home country.
Al
People miss the point here. The point is to help people where they live to make more of their own country using their recourses and people. Lets empty all of the countries in need of the best they have and see where that leaves them. Of course they want to leave, who wouldn't? Taking in all these immigrants makes the giver feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't do much else good.
SUZANNE E ARENA
Absolutely correct. That was what I took away from the gumball story
Brian
Scott - Do you think your income taxes pay for all of the benefits that you enjoy? & Doing - You seemed to be confused... Mr. Bugingo's post, and even the gumball video itself are not addressing "illegal immigration". The video is colorful, pseudo-math presentation based on incorrect numbers and the incorrect assumption that our immigration policy is designed to help poor countries.
doing my job no one else wants
If we actually had any idea of the number of illegal immigrants in the country we could begin to calculate the loss in revenue and taxes but since we do not know, we cannot know. you also fail to point out the same thing all liberals fail to point out, what your plan for immigration control actually is. you see you cant argue against the reduction of immigration against the tide of facts supporting the numbers as unsustainable if you don't actually have a plan other then open borders which is exactly what the gum balls are attempting to demonstrate to those less them sharp like yourself.
Scott Luckadoo
Do you really believe that “the total lifetime taxes (immigrants) and their descendants contribute exceed the benefits they receive.” If you do, I have a nice beachfront property to sell you in Kansas.