Letters to the Editor
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By this crude measure...
... shouldn't people be fleeing Monaco and Singapore to populate Mongolia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density
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What's the population density of Greenland?
Talk about a place not doing their fair share!
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Even to immigration supporters, this is dumb
This is maybe the last argument I would use in a discussion with a nativist. Even a conservative, as fact-free as they're wont to be, can fail to miss that large chunks of the US can't support large populations. We have a lot of desert, a lot of arctic, a lot of mountains. Germany has some mountains, but is mostly woods and plains. Same for Britain. They can support denser populations. A fairer comparison would be Britain compared to New England, not compared to Alaska and Arizona.
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As long as I don't get stuck in the Mississippi
This is exactly the kind of example of philosophy removed from logic that we don't need. If your summary of this argument is correct, it would suggest that the US should indeed allow immigrants from countries including the UK, Fiji, Denmark, and Mexico, while denying all immigration from countries including Chad, Russia, Mali, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After all, their population density is less than theirs. Better yet, let's start evening it out: Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Vatican are high on the population density. Let's relocate lots of their population to Greenland, Mongolia, Western Sahara, and Australia. And hey, let's refuse all immigrants until Canada--with fewer people than the US--has taken their fair share. While we're at it, let's enforce population density being literal, so that each square mile of the US actually hosts eighty people. Sure, you might get stuck in the middle of Yellowstone or Death Valley, or even in the middle of Lake Huron, as bodies of water are included in the measurement of the country.
I'm not saying that there isn't any validity whatsoever to this viewpoint, because there might be, somewhere, tangentally. As it is reported here, however, it seems more sensationalist and academic than actually reasonable or practical.
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Dear Mathias Risse:
My name is Mikes Pace. I'm visiting Boston soon and looking for somewhere to stay. I just called the Radisson in Boston (I really did) and they are offering me a room at a rate of $289.00 a night. I hear that you have a nice extra bedroom in the lovely Cambridge area. Can I swing by for the night?
Thanks,
Mikes Pace
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the other side of the argument
Even assuming for a minute (and only one minute please) that this argument makes any real sense, the other side of the argument is that we also have a duty to determine what population density is the maximum the environment can take before it is unreasonably damaged, and keep people out if it exceeds that density. Just because Japan over does it, does not mean we should.
Minute's up.
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the dangers of meaningless statistics
By the same argument, Australia (population 20.3 million, area 2.9 million square miles) has an average density of about 7 people per square mile, and hence is even more grossly "underpopulated" than the US.
This simplistic argument glosses over the slight difficulty that most of the Australian landmass is effectively uninhabitable; in fact, it can be argued (as Jared Diamond does in Collapse) that Australia is already considerably overpopulated with respect to the number of people that the land is actually capable of supporting.
Similar considerations apply to much of the western US. As the late Marc Reisner pointed out in the classic Cadillac Desert, most of the western US is desert or semi-desert: droughts are routine, major cities are entirely dependent on winter snowpack, and the overwhelming majority of agriculture (outside of California and the Pacific northwest) has been based on what amounts to the mining of underground aquifers, which will be empty in a matter of decades. It is absurd to ignore the fact that trying to inhabit these regions with population densities approaching those of, say, the BosWash corridor (which are vastly higher than the meaningless "average" number quoted by Risse), would be an unsustainable ecological disaster.
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Export the job or import the worker?
The really odd thing is that immigration controls are not an inevitable function of the nation state. If you go back say 200 or 300 years, there was very little indeed in the way of immigration control. Pretty much anybody could go and live anywhere they had the means to get to. Which isn't to say that they wouldn't get treated like shit there. On the other hand, there were very strict customs controls; the first person to meet a docking ship was the customs inspector, not the immigration officer. It was very difficult indeed to move goods and money between places. Quite the opposite of today, really.
There are these very odd bedfellows-- people concerned about jobs being exported/foreign goods being imported tend to be the same folks concerned about importing people. Frankly, wouldn't it be better to import people than export jobs? But being against both just isn't going to cut it today. Sometimes you gotta miss marxist international proletarian solidarity.
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That is the stupidest argument I've heard for more immigration
Comparing population densities over arbitrary national boundaries is ridiculous. Western Europe is essentially one big urban/suburban complex, with most of the land habitable by humans. If you expand the boundaries in a more reasonable manner, such as considering the Population density of all of Europe, you will quickly find that the density goes down dramatically. Major parts of the United States are not suitable for dense populations. For example, the Great Basin has little potable water and soil that is generally unsuitable for farming. The Sierra Nevada could be sparsely populated, but at great environmental and economic cost. Expanding the logic of the "equal density" argument, then Canada is vastly underpopulated, since it has 1/10 of the U.S. population in an area of roughly equal size. The Great Plains are habitable, but we need to grow food for everybody else (including much of Europe), and a population density as high as that of Europe would be disastrous.
Japan can maintain fairly high population densities only because they have a diet heavy in fish and live on islands. China can barely manage their population. England imports most of it's food. Bangladesh is hardly a model for quality of life. The United States is not underusing it's resources. We probably are overusing many of them, using technology, including excessive petroleum, to support a lifestyle for ourselves and other parts of the world that would not be sustainable in a less wealthy nation.