It must be very hard for our narcissist president to think of an immigrant as a potential asset versus a liability. Surely an immigrant, any immigrant, couldn’t be as smart, resourceful, inventive, productive, compassionate, as he, right? (Are we setting a too low bar here?)

The anti-immigrational view rests on the absurd notion that human life is a zero sum game. That is, a belief that an immigrant generally, over the arc of his/her life, “takes” more than “gives”, surely not giving a drop over his takings. And this only because he/she comes from another place on the planet?

Of course this can’t be true, else how could any human innovation be explained? Indeed, most inhabitants of planet earth give more than they take, or else, human civilization would have disappeared long ago.

Indeed, how could have homo-sapiens in general evolved their culture and technology to this point? Some of these smart homo-sapiens invented toilets and cooking pots, and earlier figured out how to light and maintain fire, etc., right?. They weren’t all US citizens. Some of the early pioneers might have easily come from “shit hole” countries too, or who knows what other places on our planet.

Why would a human being, just because he is an “immigrant” be so fundamentally different than other genus homo-sapiens?

That established, the truth is, if homo-sapiens’ evolutionary success depended on at least some genius members “giving more than taking,” that is, innovating and inventing, than some number of that Trump ”immigrant” group, so feared and even defiled by Trump, will “give” more, vastly and wildly more, than they can possibly take.

Examples abound in long and short term human history, of extraordinary contributors to human history, culture, science, and technology that are way to numerous to list, and they or their parents weren’t born in the US.

And this is the point. If you look at new citizens as potential assets, surely among that group will be, even if only a few, creative, inventive, genius innovators that improve life for all other genus homo sapiens and who help our planetary civilization thrive.

Even if the rest of planetary citizens give not an iota of more than what they take, or even, those fewer, like our president, who take far more than they give, these extraordinary homo-sapiens will more than compensate in the longer run, even if they happen to be “exports” from one place and “imports” to another.

And this is the irony, called the “law of large numbers”. That is, the more homo-sapiens, effectively, the more immigrants, to our shores, the greater the likelihood that some outlier few genius innovators will be among them, helping America to continue to thrive. Perhaps some genius homo-sapiens like Edison, Steve Jobs, Charles Flint, Bill Gates, Charles Pierce, Copernicus, Galileo, DaVinci, Einstein, Jonas Salk, Aristotole, Jesus, (the list goes on and on), might wind up on our shores. Any single one of them can have an impactd positively affecting literally millions or billions of other homo-sapiens.

Anti-immigration dooms America to slow decay and certain mediocrity and even worse.

Sent from my iPad